Bloggers and even historians persist in writing as if, before the war, Danzig belonged to Poland. It didn't. It was a free city under the League of Nations, with a population that was about 90% ethnic German. It was thus analogous to Austria: both were German lands that had at one time been part of the German Reich and whose people wished to return to the Reich, but which had been forbidden to unite with the Reich by the powers that won WWI and dictated the peace settlements. Poland did have the right to use Danzig as an outlet for its trade, but down to the day he declared war, Hitler offered to respect and maintain that right, as well as Poland's access to the nearby port it had built for itself at Gdynia.

Do you really believe that the NS could have pushed the West to liberate itself from its jewish masters (not only media, but also politics and economy)? You are very naive if you think they could have suceeded in doing that.

I think there was a chance:

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Canadian Prime Minister (before, during, and after the war) Mackenzie King ( visited Hitler in 1937):

1937: King was impressed by Hitler. He wrote, "My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make any sacrifice for their good." Hitler appeared to be "a man of deep sincerity and a genuine patriot. As I talked with him [Hitler], I could not but think of Joan of Arc." (Diary, June 29, 1937)

1938: "He [Hitler] might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world."

1938: After the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, agreed at Munich to sacrifice part of Czechoslovakia in the hope of appeasing Hitler, King sent him a telegram of appreciation. "What a happy man Chamberlain must be, and what an example he has set to the world in perseverance of a just cause," King wrote.

1939: British public opinion swung against Hitler, so too in the Dominions. In the cabinet, the Foreign Secretary now spoke out against further appeasement. Guarantees were issued to Poland and others but the key one was Poland. <> On September 1st 1939, the Germans invaded Poland.

1946: King blamed Hitler and the men themselves for their fate, writing, "It really was a horrible and pathetic, tragic sight to see the men and to think that that particular group of men under one leader – a maniac – a devil incarnate – had been able to bring destruction upon themselves, their country and the world to the extent they have and, worst of all, destruction to moral standards." (Diary, August 22, 1946)

Here's Mackenzie King speaking about the Jewish refugees situation in Europe:

In Sept. 1938 less than a year before Canada declared war on Germany, King was still mixed in his attitude to Hitler: "He might come to be thought of as one of the saviours of the world" he wrote. "He had the chance at Nuremberg, but was looking to force, to might, and to violence as means to achieving his ends, which were, I believe at heart, the well-being of his fellow-man, not all fellow men, but those of his own race." In 1939 he (King) said to a Jewish delegation that: "Kristallnacht might turn out to be a blessing".

Even the famous "voyage of the dammed" received no mercy in Canada. This ship loaded with 907 Jews from Hamburg was on its way to Cuba but Cuba refused it. The U.S. and Canada refused them and Canada even sent out a "gun boat" to shadow them.

I have just returned from a visit to Germany. In so short time one can only form impressions or at least check impressions which years of distant observation through the telescope of the Press and constant inquiry from those who have seen things at a closer range had already made on one's mind. I have now seen the famous German Leader and also something of the great change he has effected. Whatever one may think of his methods - and they are certainly not those of a parliamentary country - there can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvellous transformation in the spirit of the people, in their attitude towards each other, and in their social and economic outlook. He rightly claimed at Nuremberg that in four years his movement has made a new Germany. It is not the Germany of the first decade that followed the war - broken, dejected, and bowed down with a sense of apprehension and importance. It is now full of hope and confidence, and of a renewed sense of determination to lead its own life without interference from any influence outside its own frontiers. There is for the first time since the war a general sense of security. The people are more cheerful. There is a greater sense of general gaiety of spirit throughout the land. It is a happier Germany. I saw it everywhere and Englishmen I met during my trip and who knew Germany well were very impressed with the change. One man has accomplished this miracle. He is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart. He is not merely in name but in fact the national Leader. He has made them safe against potential enemies by whom they were surrounded. He is also securing them against that constant dread of starvation, which is one of the poignant memories of the last years of the War and the first years of the Peace. Over 700,000 died of sheer hunger in those dark years. You can still see the effect in the physique of those who were born into that bleak world. The fact that Hitler has rescued his country from the fear of a repetition of that period of despair, penury and humiliation has given him unchallenged authority in modern Germany. As to his popularity, especially among the youth of Germany, there can be no manner of doubt. The old trust him; the young idolise him. It is not the admiration accorded to a popular Leader. It is the worship of a national hero who has saved his country from utter despondency and degradation. It is true that public criticism of the Government is forbidden in every form. That does not mean that criticism is absent. I have heard the speeches of prominent Nazi orators freely condemned. But not a word of criticism or of disapproval have I heard of Hitler. He is as immune from criticism as a king in a monarchical country. He is something more. He is the George Washington of Germany - the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors. To those who have not actually seen and sensed the way Hitler reigns over the heart and mind of Germany this description may appear extravagant. All the same, it is the bare truth. This great people will work better, sacrifice more, and, if necessary, fight with greater resolution because Hitler asks them to do so. Those who do not comprehend this central fact cannot judge the present possibilities of modern Germany. On the other hand, those who imagine that Germany has swung back to its old Imperialist temper cannot have any understanding of the character of the change. The idea of a Germany intimidating Europe with a threat that its irresistible army might march across frontiers forms no part of the new vision. What Hitler said at Nuremberg is true. The Germans will resist to the death every invader at their own country, but they have no longer the desire themselves to invade any other land. The leaders of modern Germany know too well that Europe is too formidable a proposition to be overrun and trampled down by any single nation, however powerful may be its armaments. They have learned that lesson in the war. Hitler fought in the ranks throughout the war, and knows from personal experience what war means. He also knows too well that the odds are even heavier today against an aggressor than they were at that time. What was then Austria would now be in the main hostile to the ideals of 1914. The Germans are under no illusions about Italy. They also are aware that the Russian Army is in every respect far more efficient than it was in 1914. The establishment of a German hegemony in Europe which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism. ...
Daily Express (London), November 17, 1936

I think any person would agree, including Jews, that WWII was an awful mistake. Anything less violent would have been better.

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Originally Posted by kazan188

The Gleiwitz incident - an alleged Nazi "false flag" - was just one of 21 cross-border raids on the night of August 31 by Polish irregulars. Wasn't that a declaration of war? But the winners of wars are never responsible for wars, are they? How many German cross-border raids would Americans and Brits have borne on their soil before considering Germany had declared war on them?

Your theory would maybe stand for one or two seconds if the noble Allies had declared war on the Soviet Union when Stalin invaded the Baltic states, Ukraine, Poland and Finland. But the Allied "border savers" rather chose to team up with him.

The Allies did this because they wanted a pretext "to crush (or crunch) Germany". They perfectly knew all these things would evolve and give them the war they wanted.

I agree. If they wanted they could have negotiated at any time. If they wanted the autocracy gone then they could have negotiated it away, but instead it was always unconditional surrender because they wanted to plunder Germany.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

Zionists tried dozens of times to sell their 6 million jewish martyrs to the world before WW2 and before Hitler came to power. At that time they had always failed and they needed the chaos of a world war to be believed in. WW1 was lead for the creation of a jewish homeland in Palestine on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. But in the 20's the Arabs of Palestine revolted because of jewish settlements and it forced the British administrators to promulgate "the White Paper(s)" forbidding new jewish settlements in Palestine. The British authorities abrogated the White paper(s) after WW2 when the 6 million lie was massively promoted by influent Zionists (https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t84.../#post10207375). Coincidence?"The elite loved war and people had no mind back then" That's your explanation for WW2?

Were peace at all costs and international communication priorities of the Amerian leaders? Are they now?

I've recently read that GB had given this guarantee to Poland because of a fake document saying that the Germans had given a 48 hour ultimatum to Poland before invading it. I need more infos about this fake document. But I find it's an interesting avenue of investigation on WW2.

British upper class collaborating with jews for centuries are jews to me.

Good points.

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Originally Posted by kazan188

So you admit the "German problem" and the real cause of WW2 was because Germany was getting too strong and because Germany became so strong without the jewish gold and capitalist system. Do you?

Yes but they also hated the autocratic structure. I believe that had the NS remained semi-democratic, and removed themselves from Poland after securing their minorities, the war would have been avoided.

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Originally Posted by kazan188

"Ahmen" Not sure a hebrew word is appropriate here.

lol

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

Is a Semi-DemocraticAutocratic system possible? I don't think so. Autocracy gave Europe its most glorious hours. Democracy only gave Europe and America their most pathetic hours as puppets in jewish hands.

Poland was just a pretext. GB never cared about this country. If it was not Poland the anti-German Allies would have found anything else to lead their war to the final destruction of their German rival.

A theory...

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

IMO the Allies were fully responsible for inflating a small territorial war to the most violent war the world has ever known. What were the Allies expected when they gave a guarantee to the Polish military junta ruling Poland? The war they were waiting for years. A pretext to destroy this insolent Germany that was wonderfully succeeding without the economical system of their masters.

Agreed to a large extent.

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Originally Posted by kazan188

You're a good American. The Cold War propaganda taught you to associate the word "socialism" with "evil".

Was National Socialism (or National Evil if you prefer this term) international, multiculturalist and capitalist? No, it wasn't. But the Demoratic USA are.

No I like socialism and agreed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

You'll never see a nationalist democracy because demoracy is the dictature of majority and because majorities are always stupid. The National Socialist was elitist (society organized and ruled by superior individuals) and that's why it worked so well.

I think the best scenario would be a democratically elected - one party NS system - new leader every 4 years type thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

Don't forget that WW2 was wanted and enginneered by 2 democracies. And these democracies fought many (all?) wars since the end of WW2.

Getting humans to empathize with each others is the trick that is always used by the promoters of multiracial societies. It's the main trick of the race destroyers.

The jewish-owned capitalist system had to erase the NS system from the surface of the earth before other countries understand it is possible to live without being slaves of banks and speculators. The jewish-owned countries would have never allowed a NS Germany to last for 80 years and to demonstrate the world how harmful and unuseful the capitalist sytem is.

Like Western democracies never cared about Poland, they would have made this war continue by every possible other means if Hitler had accepted to get out of Poland. The Allied warriors deliberately proposed unaceptable propositions to Hitler because thay were sure he would refuse them.

The same Chamberlain who claimed that it was America and World Jewry that had forced England into WW2 (according to Joseph Kennedy)?

Hitler was at the top. He was more popular than ever. And you say he was trying to save his carreer? Don't you confuse Hitler with Rossevelt trying to hide the fiasco of his "New Deal" (only saved thanks to WW2)?

"What was insane of the West was not presenting peace terms in the form of: dismantling the autocracy back to democracy" It was because, like they said, they were not fighting Hitler but the strength of the German folk.

Or perhaps it was because he loved the British and American people as Germanic brothers and because he thought there were certains limits not to cross to win a war. He had been gassed himself during WW1 and so he perfectly knew what a gassing implied.

Every great leader through History had a kind of Messiah complex. Nobody began such an adventure without thinking he was called to do it. "Normal" (i.e. average) people never risks all like great leaders do.

IMO the longer the war was lasting the more risks of being assassinated Hitler was running. I think he knew it. If he had wanted to protect his own life, Hitler would have made the war as short as possible. And using chemial warfare against the Allied soldiers would have been a perfect mean to reach that goal.

The Nazis were not afraid of mutual destruction. Do you know what "total war" meant at that time?

Interesting points - thanks for the conversation.

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Originally Posted by british74

UC, I still think one of the best videos to watch about the border dispute between Poland and Germany is

World Jewry basically created the conditions necessary to foment World War One and World War Two. They did this to create the League of Nations and the United Nations, which they use as their tools to control the world and to create fake Israel (which is also used to control the world for Christians fall victim to the Jewish lies).

From the Jewish perspective, whites killing whites is the best case scenario possible, for the Jews get to sit back and laugh and watch their enemies destroy themselves, while planning and preparing post war reparations to further weaken the strongest white countries; thus destroying our power structure and dividing us further.

Western democracies deciding to liberate themselves from jewish influence thanks to negociations with the NS regime. Very, very unlikely for me. But we'll never know.

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I think any person would agree, including Jews, that WWII was an awful mistake. Anything less violent would have been better.

It would have be the first time jews wouldn't make profit with a war.

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"When the National Socialists and their friends cry or whisper that this [the war] is brought about by Jews, they are perfectly right."
- The Jewish magazine Sentinel of Chicago (8 October 1940)

"The Second World War is being fought for the defense of the fundamentals of Judaism."
- Rabbi Felix Mendlesohn, Chicago Sentinel (October 8, 1942)

"We are not denying and are not afraid to confess that this war is our war and that it is waged for the liberation of Jewry..."- Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Jewish Congress, Head of the Jewish Agency and later President of Israel, in a Speech on December3, 1942, in New York.

"Hitler doesnt want war but he will be forced to it, and in fact soon. England has the final say like in 1914."
- Zionist Emil Ludwig Cohn "Annalen"

"Although Hitler may want to prevent this war, which can devour him, in the last moment, he will be forced to war anyway."
- Emil Ludwig Cohn (1938)

"We Jews are going to bring a war on Germany."
- David A. Brown, National Chairman, United Jewish Campaign, 1934 (quoted in I Testify Against The Jews by Robert Edward Edmondson, page 188 and The Jewish War of Survival by Arnold Leese, page 52)

"I asked Joe Kennedy (US embassador in London) about his talks with Roosevelt and N. Chamberlain in 1938. He said it had been Chamberlains belief in 1939 that Great Britain has nothing in its hands to fight and therefore wouldnt dare to go to war against Hitler...Neither the French nor the English would have made Poland a motive for war if they hadnt been continuously spurred on by Washington...America and the World-Jewry have driven England to war."
- US defence minister J. Forrestal 27.12.1945 in his diary (The Forrestal Diaries, New York, 1951, S. 121 ff)

"Even if Hitler at the last moment would want to avoid war which would destroy himhe will, in spite of his wishes, be compelled to wage war."

- Emil Ludwig Cohen in his book The New Holy Alliance( Strasburg, 1938)

"We managed to drag the United States into the First World War and if they (the US) do what we demand in regards to Palestine and the Jewish armed forces, then we can get the Jews in the USA to drag the United States into this one (the Second World War) too."
- Weizmann to Churchill (September 1941)

"Each of you, Jew and Gentile alike, who has not already enlisted in this sacred war should do so now and here. It is not sufficient that you should buy no goods made in Germany. You must refuse to deal with any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronises German ships or shipping.... we will undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends."

- Samuel Undermeyer, in a Radio Broadcast on WABC, New York (August 6, 1933, reported in the New York Times, August 7, 1933)

"Joining with Samuel Untermeyer in calling for a war against Germany, Bernard Baruch, at the same time, was promoting preparations for war against Germany. 'I emphasised that the defeat of Germany and Japan and their elimination from world trade would give Britain a tremendous opportunity to swell her foreign commerce in both volume and profit.'"

- Baruch, The Public Years, by Bernard M. Baruch (p.347)

"There is only one power which really counts. The power of political pressure. We Jews are the most powerful people on earth, because we have this power, and we know how to apply it."

- Vladimir Jabotinsky in Jewish Daily Bulletin (July 27, 1935)

"Before the end of the year, an economic bloc of England, Russia, France and the U.S.A will be formed to bring the German and Italian economic systems to their knees."

- Paul Dreyfus, La Vie de Tanger (May 15, 1938)

"On the 3rd of June, 1938, the American Hebrew boasted that they had Jews in the foremost positions of influence in Britain, Russia and France, and that these "three sons of Israel will be sending the Nazi dictator to hell."

- Joseph Trimble, The American Hebrew.

"Germany is our public enemy number one. It is our object to declare war without mercy against her. One may be sure of this: We will lead that war!"

- Bernard Lecache, the president of the "International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism," in its newspaper Droit de Vivre (Right to Life) (9 November, 1938)

"The war now proposed is for the purpose of establishing Jewish hegemony throughout the world."

- Brigadier General George Van Horn Mosely, The New York Tribune (March 29, 1939)

Yes but they also hated the autocratic structure. I believe that had the NS remained semi-democratic, and removed themselves from Poland after securing their minoirities, the war would have been avoided.

If Poland and its independance were really so important for GB why was this country given to Stalin at the end of WW2? i keep thinking Poland was just a pretext used by western democracies to break successful Germany.

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I think the best scenario would be a democratically elected - one party NS system - new leader every 4 years type thing.

It's your opinion. It's not mine. IMO democratic leaders never do any 'revolutionary' things because they are always afraid to look unpleasant to their electors and not to be re-elected the next time.

« Meanwhile, the war against the Soviet Union has allowed us to dispose of new territories for the final solution. Consequently, the Führer has decided to displace the Jews not towards Madagascar but towards the East. Thus, there is no longer any need to consider Madagascar for the final solution. »

- Franz Rademacher, Feb. 10th 1942, Nuremberg Doc. NG-3933

« Revisionists are just the messengers, the stupid impossibility of the 'Holocaust' story line is the message.»

A lot of people forget that the Soviet Union did about 90% of the actual fighting in the war against Hitler. Starting in 1942 Stalin repeatedly asked his "allies" in the west to either open a second front Europe or at least send military forces, particularly air power to help Soviet forces. In both cases he got promises that were never kept.

What he got instead was a declaration of a policy of "unconditional surrender" in early 1943 about which he was never consulted, a policy which gave the Germans every incentive to fight to the bitter end. In spite of repeated protests from Stalin to modify this ill-considered policy, Roosevelt flatly refused to change his position, guaranteeing continued huge Russian losses while the west postponed its promised attack in the west for two years.

Even before the onset of the Cold War in the years after 1945, tension and distrust marked the relationship between Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Although this tension was understandable given the ideological differences between capitalism and communism, a more important immediate cause was the bizarre, even duplicitous, conduct of President Franklin D. Roosevelt toward Josef Stalin.

The evidence below concerns two important areas of disagreement between the Soviet union and the Western Allies, especially the United States, during the Second World War: 1) the opening of a second front against Germany in Western Europe and 2) the policy of unconditional surrender. Unfulfilled promises made to Stalin by Roosevelt and Churchill (the former in particular) about opening a second front in 1942 and then the American-British adoption of a policy of unconditional surrender without consulting the Soviets deepened the distrust between the West and the Soviets that later developed into the Cold War.

The decisions not to open a second European front in 1942 and to demand the unconditional surrender of Germany also had significant effects on the course of the war itself.

Lengthening the war. Several of Hitler's former generals have attested to the lengthening of the war caused by unconditional surrender. Once the policy was adopted in 1943 it gave Joseph Goebbels an important propaganda weapon. Most of the German people did not have access to information other than that provided by the regime. Goebbels was therefore able to exploit unconditional surrender as proof that the Allies sought to utterly destroy the German people. This hardened the resolve of ordinary Germans to fight on to the bitter end, especially on the Eastern Front. If no quarter could be expected then surrender was not an option. Consequently millions of people would die because of the inflexibility of Allied policy. Furthermore, because unconditional surrender ensured that the Germans would fight on no matter what the cost, it also ensured that the Soviets would have to fight their way across Eastern Europe and deep into Germany proper. Eventually, Stalin came to see that the policy of unconditional surrender played into his hands. Creating a series of subservient, client states in Eastern Europe had been a long-standing objective of Russian foreign policy, even well before the revolution in 1917. Unconditional surrender finally allowed Stalin to achieve this goal.

Undercutting German resistance efforts. Although the German resistance to the Nazis was not substantial, several plots on Hitler's life were being planned in 1943. The most important of these, that within some echelons of the German officer corps, stood a reasonable chance of success. However, the eventual success of any coup against Hitler depended on the ability of the resistance to say that the Allies would help stabilize Germany if it was led by someone other than Hitler. The policy of unconditional surrender significantly undercut any popular support that the resistance could count upon.

Sealing the fate of millions of Jews. By January 1943 (when unconditional surrender was decided) large pockets of Jews within Nazi-occupied Europe were still alive, including practically all of the Jews within the major ghettoes of Warsaw and Łódz. These Jews would be slaughtered in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps throughout 1943. In 1944 the Jewish population of Hungary also would be largely exterminated in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Had a more flexible policy been adopted by Roosevelt and Churchill, a policy which would have allowed Germans to surrender anywhere under any circumstances, the German war effort probably would have collapsed much sooner than May 1945.

FALSE ANGLO-AMERICAN PROMISES TO RUSSIA ABOUT OPENING A SECOND FRONT IN EUROPE

In late May 1942, the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov made a secret visit to Washington with the expressed aim of securing an American promise to open a second front in France against Germany by autumn of that year. Since fall of the previous year, thus before the United States was even actively engaged in the war, plans for fighting Germany in France had been under development in the War Department. By the spring of 1942 these plans had developed into Operation Sledgehammer, which foresaw an emergency invasion across the English Channel to draw German troops from the Soviet front in case the military collapse of the USSR appeared imminent. What remained unknown was the timetable for such an invasion. Roosevelt favored an unrealistically early assault date. As Robert Sherwood notes,

"In his long cable to Churchill of March 9, [1942] Roosevelt had spoken of 'plans for establishment of a new front on the European Continent,' adding, 'I am becoming more and more interested in the establishment of the new front this summer'." Five days later, Roosevelt reiterated the matter of a second front to Harry Hopkins, writing in a memorandum, "I doubt if any single thing is as important as getting some sort of a front this summer against Germany."[1]

Throughout the early months of 1942 the Kremlin had desperately sought the active military involvement of British and American forces in Western Europe. However, despite American plans, successive Soviet diplomatic communiqués calling for a second front had been summarily rebuffed by Washington. The negative American attitude appeared to have changed in April 1942 when Roosevelt invited Molotov to Washington specifically to discuss relieving German pressure on the Soviets. After arriving at the White House on May 29, Molotov discussed with Roosevelt the subject of a second front on the next day (May 30).

According to Sherwood, Molotov asked Roosevelt directly:

"... Could we undertake such offensive action as would draw off 40 German divisions which would be, to tell the truth, distinctly second-rate outfits? If the answer should be in the affirmative, the war would be decided in 1942. If negative, the Soviets would fight on alone, doing their best, and no man would expect more from them than that. He had not, Mr. Molotov added, received any positive answer in London. Mr. Churchill had proposed that he should return through London on his homeward journey from Washington, and had promised Mr. Molotov a more concrete answer on his second visit. Mr. Molotov admitted he realized that the British would have to bear the brunt of the action if a second front were created, but he also was cognizant of the role the United States plays and what influence this country exerts in questions of major strategy. Without in any way minimizing the risks entailed by a second front action this summer, Mr. Molotov declared his government wanted to know in frank terms what position we take on the question of a second front, and whether we were prepared to establish one. He requested a straight answer.

The difficulties, Mr. Molotov urged, would not be any less in 1943. The chances of success were actually better at present while the Russians still have a solid front. 'If you postpone your decision,' he said, 'you will have eventually to bear the brunt of the war, and if Hitler becomes the undisputed master of the continent, next year will unquestionably be tougher than this one.'
The President then put to General Marshall the query whether developments were clear enough so that we could say to Mr. Stalin that we are preparing a second front. 'Yes,' replied the General. The President then authorized Mr. Molotov to inform Mr. Stalin that we expect the formation of a second front this year."[2]

Three days later, on June 1st, Roosevelt repeated to Molotov his promise to open a second front in 1942 and an official press statement to this effect was prepared for release upon Molotov's safe arrival in Moscow: "In the course of the conversations [between the President and Molotov] full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942."[3]

His promises to Molotov aside, Roosevelt was well aware that the United States was incapable of launching an invasion of France in 1942. Already, one month earlier during Anglo-American staff talks in London, General George Marshall "spoke at some length of the possibility that they might be compelled to launch the emergency operation, known as SLEDGEHAMMER, sometime before the autumn of 1942. If this were necessary, he said, the American contribution in troops would necessarily be a modest one since there was not enough shipping to transport a substantial force across the Atlantic within the next five months. He said that the President was opposed to any premature operation, involving such great risks, but that if such an operation were made necessary by developments on the Russian Front, American troops should take part in it to the fullest possible extent."[4]

Subsequent events demonstrated that an Anglo-American offensive would indeed become a reality in 1942, but what Molotov and Stalin did not know was that the second front they opened would be in North Africa and not in Europe. The second front in France requested by Stalin would not become a reality until June 1944. The Soviets would thus continue to fight the bulk of the German Army alone for another two years.

Given the past betrayal by Great Britain of its Eastern European allies (see below) and the failure to open a second front in Europe despite the promises of President Roosevelt, Stalin can perhaps be forgiven if by early 1943 he believed the United States and Great Britain were willing to fight the Third Reich to the last drop of Soviet blood.

STALIN AND UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER

At the end of the Allied war conference held in Casablanca, Morocco between January 14 and 24, 1943, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a joint statement calling for the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. Although the policy of unconditional surrender was intended to prevent the rise of a "stab in the back" myth that could fuel a resurgence of German militarism and nationalism after the war, it had a far wider impact than Roosevelt (its primary creator) could have imagined.

Josef Stalin actively disliked the policy of unconditional surrender, until after the tide of the war had shifted decisively in his favor and ongoing German resistance provided a reason for Soviet troops to push deeper and deeper into Eastern Europe and Germany. At the heart of Stalin's disdain for the policy was his deep distrust of the Western democracies. To a considerable this lack of trust derived from direct experience dealing with them.

In 1938 and 1939, for instance, the willingness of Great Britain and France to betray their promises to protect Czechoslovakia and Poland from German aggression (see our page on theWestern Betrayal of Poland in 1939), as well as their (particularly Britain's) thinly-veiled diplomatic coldness toward Moscow, led Stalin to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. This pact also contained secret clauses that allowed the Soviet Union to occupy eastern Poland several weeks after the German attack.

Then, in June 1941, German forces attacked the Soviet Union and drove to within striking distance of Moscow by December of that year. In 1942 the Soviet situation was desperate and President Roosevelt repeatedly promised to open hostilities on the European Continent against Germany that year. The Red Army thus continued to fight the vast majority of Hitler's troops alone. Soviet arms continued to sustain atrocious losses, the Germans occupied vast sections of Soviet territory, and the country teetered on the brink of destruction.

Until early 1945, therefore, Stalin continued to follow a policy of conditional surrender with the Germans. He made it clear multiple times that the Red Army would gladly enter into peace negotiations with the Germans as long as Hitler and his government were removed from power. For instance, after the victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, just one week after the unconditional surrender announcement at Casablanca, Stalin stated:

"Occasionally the foreign press engages in prattle to the effect that the Red Army's aim is to exterminate the German people and destroy the German state. This is, of course, a stupid lie and a senseless slander against the Red Army. ... It would be ridiculous to identify Hitler's clique with the German people and the German state. History shows that Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain."[5]

This was followed by another Stalin appeal on November 6, 1943, when German forces were in full retreat:

"It is not our aim to destroy Germany, for it is impossible to destroy Germany, just as it is impossible to destroy Russia. But the Hitler state can and should be destroyed. It is not our aim to destroy all organized military force in Germany, for every literate person will understand that this is not only impossible in regard to Germany, as it is in regard to Russia, but it is also inadmissible from the viewpoint of the victor."[6]

Lastly, according to the American Ambassador to Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov told him in 1943 that "Stalin had some reservations about it (i.e. the policy of unconditional surrender), that it might make the Germans fight harder." Harriman claims to have advised Molotov to have Stalin "raise the question with the president, which he did [at Teheran]. But Roosevelt never followed up Stalin's suggestion that he clarify his meaning."[7]

STALIN COMPLAINS OFFICIALLY ABOUT UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER

Stalin never shielded his misgivings about the policy of unconditional surrender from either Roosevelt or Churchill. In fact, he openly asked for some kind of declaration of surrender terms, no matter how harsh. Consider his appeal to Roosevelt and Churchill during dinner on the first night of the Teheran Conference, on Sunday, November 28, 1943:

"As a war-time measure Marshal Stalin questioned the advisability of the unconditional surrender principle with no definition of the exact terms which would be imposed upon Germany. He felt that to leave the principle of unconditional surrender unclarified merely served to unite the German people, whereas to draw up specific terms, no matter how harsh, and tell the German people that this was what they would have to accept, would, in his opinion, hasten the day of German capitulation."[8]

Considerable confusion has arisen as a result of sloppy record-keeping in connection with this dinner. For example, British records erroneously indicate that the dinner and Stalin's comment occurred the following night, on November 29, 1944. Roosevelt's personal translator, Charles Bohlen, is adamant, however, stating that "during dinner and afterwards" on November 28th Stalin kept returning to the issue of unconditional surrender. The confusion surrounds if and when Roosevelt was present to hear Stalin's concerns. According to Bohlen and the official record Roosevelt was present and finished dinner with the rest of the party. Soon afterward, though, the President took ill, excused himself, and did not return. Stalin then continued to press Churchill on the subject of unconditional surrender without FDR being present. Roosevelt later added to the confusion by claiming in a Memorandum for the Secretary of State on December 23, 1943 that the subject of unconditional surrender "was not brought up in any way at Teheran in my presence." This lapse of memory may have been caused by Roosevelt's illness.

"Hull tells Eden that you have no recollection of any remarks by UJ [Uncle Joe] about unconditional surrender. I certainly heard, with great interest, him saying something to the effect that he thought it might be well to consider telling the Germans at some stage what unconditional surrender would involve, or perhaps what it would not involve. After that we began talking about the 50,000 [German officers to be shot] and your compromise and my high falutin, and I finished up by no means certain that the Germans would be reassured if they were told what he had in mind.

Find also [that] Anthony [Eden] telegraphed to the Foreign Office on November 30 as follows: 'Last night (November 29th) Marshal Stalin spoke to the President about unconditional surrender. Marshal Stalin said he considered this bad tactics vis-à-vis Germany and his suggestion was that we should together work out terms and let them be known generally to the people of Germany.'

Perhaps this may give you a cue to what Anthony and I had in our memories and you may feel inclined to join with us in asking UJ whether he would care to develop his theme to us. If, however, you prefer we can of course leave things where they are for the time being."

THE POST-CONFERENCE MEMO FROM MOSCOW TO WASHINGTON

Having had his concerns ignored by Roosevelt at Teheran, Stalin made yet another effort to communicate his displeasure with the policy of unconditional surrender. According to Charles Bohlen, some time after the Teheran Conference, Moscow transmitted a communiqué to the State Department "questioning the doctrine of unconditional surrender, which Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to at their meeting in Casablanca in early 1943.[*] The Kremlin repeated the arguments raised at Teheran that unconditional surrender afforded the Nazi propagandists an opportunity to play on the fear of the unknown and thereby stiffen the German willingness to fight. Impressed by the argument, Hull asked what I thought. I replied that Moscow indeed had a good point. At Hull's suggestion, I drafted a memorandum, which he signed and sent to Roosevelt. Supporting the Soviet suggestion, the memo said:

'As I understand it, the Soviet government believes that some definition, however general and severe, of the conditions of surrender which will be imposed on the enemy countries would deprive the enemy of this propaganda advantage and consequently weaken the morale of their armed forces and people. In view of the Soviet interest in this matter, do you approve of discussions with the Soviet and British governments to explore the desirability of some public definition for propaganda exploitation of the terms of unconditional surrender to be imposed on the respective enemy countries?'

THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR A FREE GERMANY AND LEAGUE OF GERMAN OFFICERS

Thus the policy of unconditional surrender would be followed by the Western Allies until the bitter end. However, Soviet policy toward German surrender continued to be marked by ambivalence.[11] As the war continued into 1944 it appeared publicly that Stalin had fallen into line behind unconditional surrender. Yet behind Soviet lines various appeals for German surrender on any terms would continue to be made. The most famous of these appeals were made by the members of the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) and the League of German Officers (BDO).

Formed in 1943, the NKFD was comprised of German expatriates (typically German communists) and former German soldiers who had either been captured by the Red Army. The NKFD formerly came into existence in July 1943 with the future president of the communist German Democratic Republic, Walter Ulbricht, as its head. The members of the NKFD published a weekly newspaper and distributed leaflets across the battlefront calling for the surrender of German troops. They also produced radio programs and employed trucks fitted with loudspeakers which went to the front and asked German troops to lay down their arms. The League of German Officers was formed several months later in September 1943 following the German defeat at Kursk. Its chief was General Walther von Seydlitz, who had capitulated at Stalingrad.

In July and August 1944 the NKFD and BDO experienced their greatest successes thanks to the failure of an assassination attempt on Hitler's life on July 20th. On July 22 eighteen senior ranking officers from what formerly had been Army Group Center crossed Soviet lines. Army Group Center had once been a hotbed of opposition to Hitler and many officers had been complicit in a failed plot to kill Hitler in 1942. These officers now feared for their lives in the purge that followed the failed assassination. Two weeks later, on August 8th, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the man who had surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943, also joined the NKFD, becoming the organization's highest-ranking member. Paulus had grown increasingly critical of Hitler and the war effort throughout his captivity. However, until this point he would not voice his opposition publicly. Finally, with the failure of the assassination plot in 1944, Paulus declared a complete break with the Nazi regime. He spent the rest of the war making radio broadcasts on the Eastern Front calling for Germans to turn away from Hitler and to surrender.

Western democracies deciding to liberate themselves from jewish influence thanks to negotiations with the NS regime. Very, very unlikely for me. But we'll never know.

Good question. I think if the NS could have pulled off their goals peacefully, then the West would have come to terms psychologically with the absurdity of its 2000 years of, by modern medical standards, fantasy schizophrenic Levant folklore. The Jews and their co-religions would have been dissolved sooner, as well as the left wing - right wing political concept and there would simply be democratic NS for all European nations. I mean forget that 'nationalism' and 'socialism' were ever associated with the nazis - the two terms are fundamental to the health of any society.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

It would have been the first time jews wouldn't make profit with a war.

Interesting idea.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kazan188

If Poland and its independence were really so important for GB why was this country given to Stalin at the end of WW2? i keep thinking Poland was just a pretext used by western democracies to break successful Germany.

The psychopath Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech, after refusing to even talk about peace with the NS causing 60 million deaths:

Interesting text. Churchill and Roosevelt wanted Hitler and Stalin to destroy each other while Stalin wanted the Western powers to destroy each other (NS Germany vs Western democracies) before invading and "communizing" the West. WW2 was a great chess game.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unconditioned Canuck

Good question - I think if the NS could have pulled off their goals peacefully - then the West would have come to terms psychologically with the absurdity of its 2000 years of, by modern medical standards, schizophrenic Levant folklore. The Jews and their co-religions would have been dissolved sooner, as well as the left wing - right wing political concept and there would simply be democratic NS.

You cannot make peace with people who want war with you. Gold capitalist democracies would have found another pretext to have the war they wanted with Germany. Like democratic leaders must always look like the good guys of the story (if they don't their leaders won't be re-elected) they always need to hide their real motives and to find false pretexts. The Polish pretext was perfect at that time. But if it had failed the Western democracies would certainly have found another one. Their economical boycott had failed in breaking the NS system. War was the last chance of capitalist democracies to save their economical corrupted system and to prevent the successful healthy nazi economical system from spreading throughout the world (what would have destroyed the jewish enslavement economy of the Western democracies).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unconditioned Canuck

The psychopath Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech, after refusing to even talk about peace with the NS causing 60 million deaths:

In the speech, Churchill recommends Anglosphere brotherhood as a way of solving the world's problems, having just finished eradicating the German brotherhood exalted through NS.

I've nearly vomited my diner when I saw this mass murderer glorified during the recent opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London.

"Anglosphere brotherhood", isn't that a code name for "Israël's dominions"? For a Zionist like Winston Warlord Churchill it wouldn't be surprising. Democratic leaders are experts in the art of reaching their goals with fake patriotisms and alliances.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unconditioned Canuck

I don't think I could trust another Fuhrer to lead a country. Pride and ego seem to get in the way.

Democratic leaders have no pride and ego but they have dangerous hidden bosses and they ruthlessly defend their bosses' interests. They have caused enough wars and deaths to be considered as harmful and dangerous. WW2 and many other wars demonstrated that democratic leaders have no limit in the number of deaths they can cause in order to satisfy their masters.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unconditioned Canuck

Luckily today we have uncyclopedia to bring clarity to all the nonsense of the past:

ARTS & IDEASBritish Historians Rethink Churchill's Legacy
By BENJAMIN SCHWARZ ALTHOUGH Americans have embraced Winston Churchill as one of the great statesmen of the 20th century, he has never enjoyed unqualified adulation in his own country.

A maverick -- or, less charitably, a political turncoat -- Churchill was and still is regarded by many of his fellow Tories as an opportunist and a grandstander. And the British left could never stomach his arch-imperialism and pronounced reactionary streak. Nonetheless, for a long time everyone in Britain seemed to agree that Churchill was, as the great left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor anointed him, "the savior of his country," the man who defiantly led the British people in their seemingly hopeless resistance to Hitler.

Even this image of Churchill, though, has been under assault. Most recently Frank Johnson, a columnist and former editor of The Spectator, the venerable conservative weekly, aroused enormous controversy this spring when he raised a question in the magazine that historians have been debating for more than a quarter century: Did Churchill consider negotiating with the Nazis in 1940[*]
That debate is part of another, wider and even more acrimonious one among British historians and political figures: Should Churchill have negotiated a compromise peace with Germany?

The argument revolves around the confusing and inconclusive records of deliberations in Churchill's cabinet in May and June 1940 over whether Britain should discuss peace terms with Germany, records over which historians have argued for the 30 years that they have been available.

There is no disagreement that the cabinet debated whether Britain should sound out Hitler on what kind of peace terms he might offer. Nor is there any doubt that Churchill made comments that do not entirely support his image as the stalwart hero, pursuing the goal of "victory at all costs" and refusing even to contemplate negotiations with Berlin. He is recorded as declaring, for example, that "if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies," he would "jump at it," although he didn't see any such prospect. He also declared that he was prepared to accept "peace on terms of the restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe," which presumably included continued occupation of Czechoslovakia and western Poland, although, again, he said that such an offer was "most unlikely."

The question is how to interpret these remarks. To historians like John Lukacs, the author of several books on the period, and Martin Gilbert, Churchill's official biographer, who depict Churchill as an uncompromising hero, such remarks are evidence only of Churchill's extraordinary political skill. Consider the context. Churchill made those statements during debates with his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, one of the most ardent advocates of appeasement in the 1930's. Halifax was trying to convince the cabinet that Britain should immediately send out feelers to Hitler, arguing that if negotiations were conducted at all, the sooner they got started the better, since peace terms were likely to be more acceptable while France was still in the war and before British aircraft factories were bombed. Thus, Churchill's argument to wait for better terms was actually a way of warding off Halifax's plea to enter negotiations immediately. Talk of peace was merely a debating tactic.

Revisionist historians like Sheila Lawlor, director of the British think tank Politiea; Clive Ponting, a professor at the University of Swansea, Wales; and Andrew Roberts, Halifax's biographer, say there is little evidence for that interpretation in the historical record. Halifax, they argue, wasn't a craven defeatist. He simply did not understand that by late May of 1940 there was very little that Britain and France could offer Hitler that he was not already in a position to seize. Churchill, on the other hand, recognized that, at the very least, Britain had to maneuver into a better bargaining position, saying, "A time might come when we felt that we have to put an end to the struggle, but the terms would not then be more mortal than those offered to us now."

What people forget, the revisionists argue, is that during the cabinet debates in May 1940 every British policy maker assumed that, without a negotiated settlement, the quarter-million British soldiers trapped at Dunkirk would be killed or captured. They also argue that the idea of an armed truce with Germany didn't carry the same moral odium it does today. (Even Churchill speculated in 1935 [sic. in fact, 1937] that Hitler "will go down in history as the man who restored honor and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation"). Finally they argue that in May 1940 Britain was under even more severe economic and military constraints than those that had inspired the appeasement policies of the 1930's. Continuing the war would itself inexorably bring an end to Britain as an independent power through national bankruptcy. Indeed, the inevitability of economic collapse, coupled with the bleak strategic prospects, might have seemed to point to one answer: to accept that Germany now dominated Europe and make the best possible peace with Hitler's regime. It is on this point that the second, more controversial historical question has centered. Some British revisionist scholars such as John Charmley, a historian at the University of East Anglia, dismiss Churchill for not seeking a settlement, which they assert could have safeguarded the empire and kept Britain from becoming what they see as a vassal of the United States.

The revisionists argue that in 1940 Churchill had no strategy for winning the war. More important, they maintain that by fighting on to 1945, Churchill assured the liquidation of the empire and guaranteed that the only victors would be the Soviet Union and the United States.

Even scholars who find these arguments flawed acknowledge that Churchill's best reason for fighting on was one of which he had no knowledge at the time: that as early as July 1940 Hitler was contemplating turning against the Soviet Union. Of Hitler's intentions, no prediction can be found in British intelligence reports and strategic assessments. And so the revisionists dismiss Churchill's so-called strategy in 1940 as simply to keep plodding on, as Churchill acknowledged.

But to historians like David Reynolds of Cambridge University, the revisionists' belief that Britain could have maintained any kind of working settlement with a dominant Germany is ridiculous. With Germany in possession of bases along the northern and western coasts of France, the British were acutely vulnerable to blockade and hence would have been largely dependent on the sufferance of Berlin.

David Irving comments: UNTIL I first raised the question, after studying gaps in the Cabinet records, in my Churchill's War, vol. i, (published in 1987), NO other historian mentioned this delicate topic. See the Introductory chapter to Churchill¹s War, vol. ii, in which I analyse these later voices which took up the argument. It is abundantly plain that Hitler had no designs on the British Empire whatsoever. This is proved by documents in the Nazi archives (particularly those of the Seekriegsleitung), and by what Hitler told his own personal staff -- which they repeated in detail to me, turning over to me their private letters and diaries in support (see Hitler's War). Churchill squandered the empire in order to stay in power as prime minister. No doubt he would argue differently, but there is no alternative realistic explanation for what happened.

================================================

The Real Churchill
Mises Daily: Friday, February 27, 2004 by Adam Young

On February 4th, President Bush eulogized the life of Winston Churchill. The president described Winston Churchill as a "great man" and quickly zeroed in on the mistress that both Bush and Churchill share: war. "He was a prisoner in the Boer War, a controversial strategist in the Great War. He was the rallying voice of the Second World War, and a prophet of the Cold War." Indeed, there doesn't seem to have been a war—or an opportunity for war—that Churchill wasn't associated with during his long career.

Bush also recited Churchill's famous retort that "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it" adding that "history has been kind to Winston Churchill, as it usually is to those who help save the world," surely hoping that history will be kind to George W. Bush.

Except this history is a myth. The truth about the real Churchill—the Churchill that few know—is that he was "a man of the state: of the welfare state and of the warfare state" in Professor Ralph Raico's turn-of-phrase. The truth about Winston Churchill is that he was a menace to liberty, and a disaster for Britain, for Europe, for the United States of America, and for Western Civilization itself.

Not since fictional personages like Hercules and Zeus, have so many myths been attached to one man. As we will see, the Winston Churchill we're told about is not the Churchill known to honest history, but rather a fictional version of the man and his actions. And these words and actions have produced our mainstream "patriotic political myths" as John Denson calls them, which are merely the victor's wartime lies and propaganda scripted into the 'Official History.' The Churchill mythology is challenged by honest history, and the reality about Churchill involves hard, but necessary truths.

Churchill the Opportunist

Of course, central to the neocon mythology built up around their almost deified idealization of Churchill is that he fought for (in Bush's words comparing Tony Blair to Churchill), "the right thing, and not the easy thing," right over popularity, principle over opportunism.

Except that isn't true. Churchill was above all a man who craved power, and a man who craves power, craves opportunity to advance himself no matter what the cost.

When Churchill entered politics, many took note of his unique rhetorical talents, which gave him power over men, but it also came with a powerful failing of its own. During WWII, Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister of Australia, noted of Churchill "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way."

However, Churchill had other failings as well. The Spectator newspaper said of Churchill upon his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911: "We cannot detect in his career any principles or even any constant outlook upon public affairs; his ear is always to the ground; he is the true demagogue. . . ."

The great English classical liberal John Morley, after working with Churchill, passed a succinct appraisal of him, "Winston," he said, "has no principles."

Entering politics in 1900, Churchill (the grandson of a Duke and son of a prominent Tory) naturally joined the governing Conservative party. Then in 1904, he left the Conservatives and joined the Liberal party, and when they were in decline Churchill dumped them and rejoined the Conservatives, uttering his famous quote "It's one thing to rat, it's another to re-rat." Churchill allegedly made his move to the Liberals on the issue of free trade. However, Robert Rhodes James, a Churchill admirer, wrote: "It was believed [at the time], probably rightly, that if Arthur Balfour had given him office in 1902, Churchill would not have developed such a burning interest in free trade and joined the Liberals." Clive Ponting also notes that ". . .he had already admitted to Rosebery, he was looking for an excuse to defect from a party that seemed reluctant to recognize his talents." Since the Liberals would not accept a protectionist, Churchill had to change his tune.

It's not a surprise that this neoconservative administration and its apologists in the tamed media laud and venerate Churchill, for he was as President Bush described him; a man who was synonymous with war. Churchill loved war. In 1925, he wrote, "The story of the human race is war." This is untrue, but Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of true, classical liberalism. The story of the human race is increasing peaceful cooperation and the efforts by some to stop it through war. However, for Churchill, periods without war offered nothing but "the bland skies of peace and platitude."

Without principles or scruples, Churchill as a prominent member of the Liberal party government naturally played a role in the hijacking of liberalism from its roots in individualism, laissez-faire, free trade and bourgeois morality, to its transformation into the "New Liberalism" as a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and in America.

Churchill was also a famous opponent of Communism and of Bolshevism in particular. One of the reasons why Churchill admired Italian Fascism was Churchill believed that Mussolini had found a formula that would neutralize the appeal of communism, namely super-nationalism with a social welfarist appeal. This is a domestic formula for power that still appeals today, if the Bush Administration is any indication. Churchill went so far as to say that Fascism "proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison."

Then came 1941. Churchill made his peace with Communism. Temporarily, of course. Churchill gave unconditional support to Stalin, welcoming him as an ally, even embracing him as a friend, and calling the Breaker of Nations, "Uncle Joe." In his single-minded obsession with destroying German National Socialism (while establishing his own British national socialism) and carrying on his pre-World War I British Imperialist vendetta to destroy Germany, Churchill completely failed to consider the danger of inviting Soviet power and communism into the heart of Europe.

Of course, his self-created mythology--chiefly through his own books--states that he sensed the danger and tried to warn Roosevelt about Stalin, but the records of the time do not prove this out. In fact, Churchill's infatuation with Stalin reached the point where at the Tehran conference in November 1943, Churchill presented Stalin with a Crusader's sword; Stalin, who had murdered millions of Christians, was now presented by Churchill as a defender of the Christian West.

But if one was to sum up Churchill's passion, his overall reason for entering politics, it was the empire. The British Empire was Churchill's abiding love. He fought to expand it, he defended it, and he created his decades-long hatred of Germany because of it. The Empire was at the center of his view of the world. Even as late as 1947, Churchill opposed Indian independence. When Lord Irwin urged him to bring his views on India up-to-date by talking to some Indians Churchill replied "I am quite satisfied with my views on India, and I don't want them disturbed by any bloody Indians." So much for democracy.

Churchill the Socialist

Churchill made a name for himself as an opponent of socialism both before and after the First World War, except during the war when he was a staunch promoter of war socialism, declaring in a speech: "Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word." Of course, such rank hypocrisy was by now Churchill's stock-in-trade, and not surprisingly, during the 1945 election, Churchill described his partners in the national unity government, the Labour Party, as totalitarians, when it was Churchill himself who had accepted the infamous Beveridge Report that laid the foundations for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian (mis)management of the economy.

As Mises wrote in 1950, "It is noteworthy to remember that British socialism was not an achievement of Mr. Attlee's Labor Government, but of the war cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill."

Churchill was converted to the Bismarckian model of social insurance following a visit to Germany. As Churchill told his constituents: "My heart was filled with admiration of the patient genius which had added these social bulwarks to the many glories of the German race." He set out, in his words, to "thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system." In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: "I am on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment should be introduced into the State and the municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new functions." Churchill even said: "I go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments."

Churchill claimed that "the cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions," and attacked the Conservatives as "the Party of the rich against the poor, the classes and their dependents against the masses, of the lucky, the wealthy, the happy, and the strong, against the left-out and the shut-out millions of the weak and poor." Churchill berated the Conservatives for lacking even a "single plan of social reform or reconstruction," while boasting that his "New Liberalism" offered "a wide, comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation," incorporating "a massive series of legislative proposals and administrative acts."

Churchill had fallen under the spell of the Fabian Society, and its leaders Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who more than any other group, are responsible for the decline of British society. Here he was introduced to William, later Lord Beveridge, who Churchill brought into the Board of Trade as his advisor on social questions. Besides pushing for a variety of social insurance schemes, Churchill created the system of national labor exchanges, stating the need to "spread . . . a sort of Germanized network of state intervention and regulation" over the British labor market. Churchill even entertained a more ambitious goal for the Board of Trade. He proposed a plan whereby the Board of Trade would act as the economic "intelligence department" of the Government, forecasting trade and employment in Britain so that the Government could spend money in the most deserving areas. Controlling this pork would be a Committee of National Organisation to plan the economy.

Churchill was well aware of the electoral potential of organized labor, so naturally Churchill became a champion of the labor unions. He was a leading supporter of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 which reversed the judicial decisions which had held unions responsible for property damage and injuries committed by their agents on the unions behalf, in effect granting unions a privileged position exempting them from the ordinary law of the land. It is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions that made Britain the "Sick Man of Europe" for two generations and became the foil of Margaret Thatcher, originated with the enthusiastic help of her hero, Winston Churchill.

We can only conclude by Churchill's actions that personal freedom was the furthest thing from his mind.

Churchill and the First World War

The Great War destroyed European culture and the commitment to truths. In their place, generations embraced relativism, nihilism and socialism, and from the ashes arose Lenin, Stalin and Hitler and their evil doctrines that infect contemporary culture. In the words of the British historian, Niall Ferguson, the First World War "was nothing less than the greatest error in modern history."

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, and, during the crises that followed, used every opportunity to fan the flames of war. When the final crisis came, in 1914, Churchill was all smiles and was the only cabinet member who backed war from the start. Asquith, his own Prime Minister, wrote: "Winston very bellicose and demanding immediate mobilization . . . has got all his war paint on."

Churchill was instrumental in establishing the illegal starvation blockade of Germany. The blockade depended on scattering mines, and classified as contraband food for civilians. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions created to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. One of the consequences of the hunger blockade was that, while it killed 750,000 German civilians by hunger and malnutrition, the youth who survived went on to become the most fanatical Nazis.

The Lusitania

Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear, but it is clear that he did everything possible to ensure that innocent Americans would be killed by German attempts to break the hunger blockade.

A week before the disaster, Churchill wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was "most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany."

The Lusitania was a civilian passenger liner loaded with munitions. Earlier, Churchill had ordered the captains of merchant ships, including liners, to ram German submarines, and the Germans were aware of this. The German government even took out newspaper ads in New York warning Americans not to board the ship.

Churchill, by helping engineer the entry of the United States into the Great War, set in motion the transformation of the war into a Democratic Jihad. Wilsonianism lead to the eventual destruction of the Austrian Empire, and the creation of a vast power vacuum on Germany's southeastern border that would provide fruitful opportunities and allies for Hitler's effort to overturn the Versailles Treaty.

But Churchill was not a strategist. All he cared for, as he told a visitor after his Gallipoli disaster, was "the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans."

Churchill Between the Wars

Churchill, who had been appointed Colonial Secretary, invented two client kingdoms, Transjordan and Iraq, both artificial and unstable states. Churchill's aim of course was not liberty for oppressed peoples, as his admirers like to claim for him, but for Britain to dominate the Middle East to ensure that the oil wells of Iraq and the Persian Gulf were securely in British hands.

The Crash of 1929

In 1924, Churchill rejoined the Conservative party and was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he returned Britain to the gold standard but didn't account for the British governments wartime inflation, which consequently severely damaged exports and ruined the good name of gold. But, of course, Churchill cared nothing for economic ideas. What interested him was only that the pound would be as strong as in the days of Queen Victoria, that once more the pound would "look the dollar in the face." The consequences of this decision had a far-reaching and disastrous impact on western civilization and the consequent appeal of socialism, Nazism and communism: the Crash of 1929.

It was Churchill's unrealistic exchange ratio that caused the Bank of England and the U.S. Federal Reserve to collude to prop up the pound by inflating the U.S. dollar, which in turn fueled the speculative boom during the 1920's that collapsed when the inflating slowed.

Churchill's fame—and his mythology—originates during the period of the 30's, especially for neoconservatives, for whom it is always 1938. However, Churchill's hard line against Hitler was little different from his usual warnings about pre-war Imperial Germany, and his hard line against inter-war Weimar Germany. For Churchill saw Germany at all times and in all ways as a threat to the British Empire. A threat that had to be destroyed and forever kept under heel. For instance, Churchill denounced all calls for Allied disarmament even before Hitler came to power. Churchill, like Clemenceau, Wilson and other Allied leaders, held the unrealistic belief that a defeated Germany would submit forever to the shackles of Versailles.

And what the neocons forget, or don't know, is that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin acknowledged in the House of Commons that, had they told the people the truth, the Conservatives could never have won the 1936 election. "Supposing that I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must be armed, does anyone think that our pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry?" It was Neville Chamberlain who began the rearmament of Britain after the Munich Crisis, the arms which Churchill would not have had during the Battle of Britain, including the first deployment of radar, which Churchill mocked while in opposition in the 1930s.

Moreover, Churchill's Cassandra-like role during the '30s emerged largely because Churchill moved from one impending threat to the next: Bolshevik Russia, the General Strike of 1926, the dangers of Indian independence, the abdication crisis in 1936. During the '30s Churchill was the proverbial Boy Who Cried Wolf. Maybe his neocon admirers could have learned that lesson about Iraq.

But as in all things, even with this Churchill reversed himself. In the fall of 1937, he stated:

"Three or four years ago I was myself a loud alarmist. . . . In spite of the risks which wait on prophecy, I declare my belief that a major war is not imminent, and I still believe that there is a good chance of no major war taking place in our lifetime. . . . I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Communism."

And in his book Step By Step written in 1937, Churchill had this to say about the Mortal Enemy: ". . .one may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations." One has to wonder if Churchill was referring to himself in his hypothetical example.

The common mythology is so far from historical truth that even an ardent Churchill sympathizer, Gordon Craig, felt obliged to write:

It is reasonably well-known today that Churchill was often ill-informed, that his claims about German strength were exaggerated and his prescriptions impractical, that his emphasis on air power was misplaced.

Moreover, as a British historian noted: "For the record, it is worth recalling that in the 1930s Churchill did not oppose the appeasement of either Italy or Japan."

Churchill and the Second World War

After Munich, Chamberlain was determined that Hitler would have no more easy victories, and when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and Churchill was recalled to his old place as First Lord of the Admiralty. An astonishing thing then happened: the President of the United States by-passed all the ordinary diplomatic channels and initiated a personal correspondence, not with the Prime Minister, but with Churchill. These messages were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, and culminated in the imprisonment of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. embassy in London. Some of these messages contained allusions to FDR's agreement prior to the war to an alliance with Britain, contrary to his public statements and American law.

Three months prior to the war, Roosevelt told King George VI that he intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the U.S. Navy, and, according to the King's notes, the President stated that "if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences." The biographer of George VI, John W. Wheeler-Bennett, considered that these conversations "contained the germ of the future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement itself."

In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned over Churchill's aborted plan to pre-emptively invade Norway. After France's armed forces were destroyed by the Blitzkrieg, and the British army fled towards the Channel, Churchill the conservative, the "anti-socialist," defiled the common law by passing totalitarian legislation placing "all persons, their services and their property at the disposal of the Crown," i.e., into the hands of Churchill himself.

During the Battle of Britain, Churchill gave perhaps his most famous speech, in which he plagiarized the French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and where he uttered his famous phrase "If the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will say, "This was their finest hour!" This calls to mind another man's boast about a thousand year Reich. Churchill also hinted at his plot to drag America into the war: ". . .we shall never surrender, and even if . . . this island . . . were subjugated . . . then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old." But like Marxist Revolutionaries, Christian Millennialists and other assorted cranks, Churchill was not at all interested in "God's good time" or any other presumed unearthly schedule, and he worked night and day to collude with Roosevelt to get America into the war.

As PM, Churchill continued his policy to refuse any negotiated peace. Even after the Fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler's renewed peace overtures. This, however, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. Yet what opportunities were lost to a free France and Britain and the Low Countries before 1940 to re-arm and negotiate military defense strategies? What of the time lost that could have been used to study the Blitzkrieg method of warfare before it crashed through France? The British historian John Charmley made the crucial point that Churchill's adamant refusal even to listen to peace proposals in 1940 doomed what he claimed was most dear to him: the Empire and a Britain that was nonsocialist and independent in world affairs. One could add that by allowing Germany to overrun its weaker neighbors when peace was possible it probably also doomed European Jewry as well. How many more millions of Jews and other Europeans were murdered because of Churchill's stupidity? But it is politically incorrect, and even possibly a hate crime to suggest that better alternatives were available during World War II than those made by the Allies. Just because something turned out one way does not mean that was the only way it could have turned out or was the best result. Somehow, it is controversial to say this.

The peace camp realized something that escaped Churchill the empire romanticist: even the British Empire and her vast resources alone could not defeat the concentrated power that Germany possessed in Europe. And even more after the Fall of France, Churchill's war aim of total victory could be realized only by embroiling the United States in another world war.

As an aside to the French-haters, what they forget is that, if the U.S. army had met the Wehrmacht in 1940, it would have fared considerably worse than the French Army. National chauvinists, however, prefer their petty hatreds.

Involving America was Churchill's policy in World War II, just as it was Churchill's policy in World War I, and would be his policy again in the Cold War. Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring Roosevelt came through.

In 1940, Churchill sent British agent "Intrepid" to the United States, where he set up shop in Rockefeller Center, where, with the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, "Intrepid" and his 300 agents "intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered" and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the "isolationists" (i.e., Jeffersonians) as nazis and fascists.

In June 1941, Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war, wrote regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen: "It would be better for instance that she should be located by a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be so grateful."

Churchill also instructed the British ambassador to Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, "the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent."

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Churchill told his Cabinet "The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident."

After the U.S. had officially entered the war, on February 15, 1942, in the House of Commons, Churchill declared, of America's entry into the war: "This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass."

This deceptive alliance illustrates another of Churchill's faults. His subordination of political aims to military planning. Churchill made war for the sake of making war, with little regard for the political results that follow. He once even told Asquith that his life's ambition was "to command great victorious armies in battle." And World War II was his opportunity. Churchill and Roosevelt were both willing to do anything to destroy the menace of Nazi Germany, at a time when Hitler had killed perhaps several hundred thousand, and to do so they would ally with Hitler's former ally in the invasion of Poland, Joseph Stalin (the Soviet Union had even been invited to join the Axis in 1940), who had already murdered tens of millions. But why is it conventional wisdom that compromise with one dictator at a vital period would have been immoral while collaboration with an even greater dictator with genuine global ambitions was the mark of greatness?

The truth is Churchill cared for nothing but Britain. The lives, homes and cultures of non-Britons he took and destroyed without a care or second thought. What sort of 'conservatism' requires the murder of millions of defenseless innocents? Winston Churchill was a man who along with Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, probed just how far Western Civilization could fall in just six short years of time.

Churchill threw British support to the Communist Partisan leader Tito. What a victory for Tito would mean was no secret to Churchill. When an aide pointed out that Tito intended to transform Yugoslavia into a Communist dictatorship on the Stalinist model, Churchill retorted: "Do you intend to live there?" What a humanitarian.

Of course, in Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were confronted with a man who had an overall political aim for the war. Stalin knew what he wanted to achieve from the destruction of Germany. For Churchill, his only aim was to beat Hitler, and then he would start thinking of the future of Britain and Europe. Churchill said it in so many words: "It was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims."

Churchill's aim was in his words, the "indefinite prevention of their [the Germans'] rising again as an Armed Power." Not surprisingly, instead of making every effort to encourage and assist the anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany, Churchill responded to the feelers sent out by the German resistance with silence, thus helping to prolong the war and the killing. Even more shockingly, Churchill had nothing but scorn for the heroic officers after their failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944, even as Hitler was enjoying their filmed executions.

In the place of help, Churchill only offered Germans the slogan of unconditional surrender, which only prolonged the war further. And instead of promoting the overthrow of Hitler by anti-Nazi Germans, Churchill's policy was all-out support of Stalin. Returning from Yalta, Churchill told the House of Commons on February 27, 1945 that he did not know any government that kept its obligations as faithfully as did the Soviet Union, even to its disadvantage.

The War Crimes

That Churchill committed war crimes—planned them, aided and abetted them, and defended them—is beyond doubt. Churchill was the prime subverter through two world wars of the rules of warfare that had evolved in the West over centuries.

At the Quebec conference, Roosevelt and Churchill adopted the Morgenthau Plan, which if implemented would have killed tens of millions of Germans, giving the Germans a terrifying picture of what "unconditional surrender" would mean in practice. Churchill was convinced of the plans benefits, as it "would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor." That the Morgenthau Plan was analogous to Hitler's post-conquest plans for western Russia and the Ukraine was lost on Churchill, who according to Morgenthau, drafted the wording of the scheme.

Churchill even brainstormed dropping tens of thousands of anthrax "super bombs" on the civilian population of Germany, and ordered detailed planning for a chemical attack on six major cities, estimating that millions would die immediately "by inhalation," with millions more succumbing later.

But Churchill's greatest war crimes involved the terror bombing of German cities that killed 600,000 civilians and left some 800,000 injured. Arthur Harris ("Bomber Harris"), the head of Bomber Command, stated "In Bomber Command we have always worked on the assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing nothing."

Churchill brazenly lied to the House of Commons and the public, claiming that only military and industrial installations were targeted. In fact, the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible. Hence the application of "carpet" bombing in an attempt to terrorize the Germans into surrendering.

Professor Raico described the effect of Churchillian statesmanship: "The campaign of murder from the air leveled Germany. A thousand-year-old urban culture was annihilated, as great cities, famed in the annals of science and art, were reduced to heaps of smoldering ruins. . . ." No wonder that, learning of this, a civilized European man like Joseph Schumpeter, at Harvard, was driven to telling "anyone who would listen" "that Churchill and Roosevelt were destroying more than Genghis Khan."

According to the official history of the Royal Air Force: "The destruction of Germany was by then on a scale which might have appalled Attila or Genghis Khan." Dresden was filled with masses of helpless refugees running for their lives ahead of the advancing Red Army. The war was practically over, but for three days and nights, from February 13 to 15, 1945, British bombs pounded Dresden, killing as many as 135,000 people or more in three days. After the massacre, Churchill attempted to disclaim responsibility; even casually saying "I thought the Americans did it."

The terror bombing of Germany and the killing of civilians continued as late as the middle of April, 1945. It only stopped, as Bomber Harris noted, because there were essentially no more targets left to be bombed in Germany.

In order to kill a maximum number of Germans, Winston Churchill dismissed politics or policy as a 'secondary consideration,' and on at least two occasions said that there were "no lengths of violence to which we would not go" in order to achieve his objective. In fact he said this publicly in a speech given on September 31, 1943, and again in the House of Commons, on February 27, 1945, when unbelievable lengths of violence had already taken place. If Hitler had uttered this phrase, we would all cite it as more evidence of his barbarism. Yet, when Churchill utters it, his apologists palm it off as the resoluteness required of a great statesman, rather than describing it as an urge for mass, indiscriminate murder.

Of course, Churchill supported the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of another 200,000 civilians. When Truman fabricated the myth of the "500,000 American lives saved" to justify his mass murder, Churchill felt the need to top his lie: the atomic bombings had saved 1,200,000 lives, including 1,000,000 Americans. It was all just another of Churchill's fantasies.

Yet, after all this slaughter, Churchill would write: "The goal of World War II [was] to revive the status of man."

Churchill and the Cold War

Among Churchill's many war crimes, there are also those crimes and atrocities for which he is culpable that occurred following the war.

These include the forced repatriation of some two million old people, men, women, and children to the Soviet Union to their deaths. Then there were the massacres carried out by Churchill's protégé, Tito: tens of thousands of Croats, Slovenes and other "class-enemies" and anti-Communists were killed.

In the wake of the armies of Churchill's friend and ally, the mass deportations began. But Churchill was unmoved. In January 1945 he said: "Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . . I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-fields." Here Churchill, the great friend of liberty as Bush described him, approves of slavery. About 500,000 German civilians were enslaved to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance with the Yalta agreement where Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that slave labor constituted a proper form of "reparations."

Then there was the great atrocity of the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland, pursuant to Churchill's mad plan to violently uproot the entire polish population and move Poland westward, which he demonstrated with a set of matchsticks, and to Churchill's acceptance of the Czech leader Eduard Benes's plan for the ethnic cleansing of Bohemia and Moravia. Around two million German civilians died in this process. An entire ancient culture was obliterated. This sort of cultural jihad used to be something conservatives opposed. Today's neoconservatives instead, who evidently embrace the Marxist doctrine of sweeping away the past, would surely argue that in order to create, one must first destroy, or in that old Stalinist phrase, to make an omelet, you must first break a few eggs.

A large factor in the litany of Churchill's war crimes was his racism. Churchill was an English chauvinist, a British racist, and like Wilson, loathed the so-called "dirty whites," the French, Italians and other Latin’s, and Slavs like the Serbs, Poles, Russians, etc.... Churchill professed Darwinism, and particularly disliked the Catholic Church and Christian missions. He became, in his own words, "a materialist to the tips of my fingers," and fervently upheld the worldview that human life is a struggle for existence, with the outcome the survival of the fittest.

In 1919, as Colonial Secretary Churchill advocated the use of chemical weapons on the "uncooperative Arabs" in the puppet state of Iraq. "I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas," he declared. "I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes." Some year’s later, gassing human beings to death would make other men infamous.

An example of Churchill's racial views are his comments made in 1937: "I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place."

In Churchill's single-minded decades-long obsession with preventing a single hegemonic power from arising on the European continent that would pose a threat to the British Empire, he failed to see that his alliance with Stalin produced exactly that. "As the blinkers of war were removed," John Charmley writes, "Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been made." Churchill is alleged to have blurted out after finally realizing the scale of his blunder: "We have slaughtered the wrong pig!"

But it was too late. For decades Churchill worked for the destruction of Germany. Yet only after Stalin had devoured half of Europe did this "great statesman" realize that destroying the ability of Germany to act as a counterbalance to Russia left Europe ripe for invasion and conquest by a resurgent Russia.

By 1946 Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage about the Iron Curtain of tyranny that descended on Eastern Europe. But Churchill helped to weave the fabric.

With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own hand, Churchill saw only one recourse: to bind America to Europe permanently. Thus Churchill returned to his tried-and-true strategy, embroiling the United States in another war. This time a "Cold War" that would entrench the military-industrial complex and change America forever.

Conclusion

With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. He helped destroy laissez-faire liberalism, he played a role in the Crash of 1929, he helped start WWI, and by bringing in America to help, prolonged the war and created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, prolonged WWII, laid the groundwork for Soviet domination, helped involve America in a cold war with Russia, and pioneered in the development of total war and undermining western civilized standards.

Chris Matthews described Churchill as the "man who save[d] the honor of the 20th century." Rather than this great accolade, Winston Churchill must be ranked with Karl Marx, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the destroyers of the values and greatness of Western civilization.

And it is fitting that the Library of Congress exhibition is entitled "Churchill and the Great Republic" because few men have done more to overthrow the American Republic(s) and institute the great centralized global war machine that has taken its place.

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Adam Young is co-founder of The Resume Store, a Canadian-based service offering resumes and cover letters. Send him MAIL, and see his Mises.org Articles Archive.

Those who call for control and common sense in open-door immigration are demonised as “Nazis” and “Racists", but we are following an honourable tradition of conserving our homogeneity going back at least as far as Queen Elizabeth1 who expelled “the Blackamors” in 1602.

In this fine British tradition Sir Winston Churchill attempted to introduce a Bill to control immigration in 1955. He also wanted the Conservative Party to adopt the slogan “Keep England White”. (1)

The multi-racial idealists ignored warning signs of what mass immigration would lead to when there was plenty of evidence. The Race battles of 1919 in Glasgow in January, in South Shields in January and February, in London in April, and in Liverpool, Cardiff, Barry and Newport in June were not the first.

There had been racial battles in 1870s and 1911 in Cardiff with the Chinese community. But in 1919 they caused five deaths and serious injuries. Whole areas were cordoned off by the police and hundreds taken into protective custody. The Times reported the Cardiff battle:

“Racial riots of a grave character occurred at Cardiff during the early hours of yesterday morning. The trouble seems to have broken out simultaneously in several adjacent parts of the city about midnight. A young man named Harold Smart walked up to a constable and complained that a coloured man had cut his throat”

The constable took him to hospital but he died on arrival. This culminated in crowds of whites and blacks facing and baiting each one another. Revolver shots rang out. Six Arabs faced charges including firing a revolver. It appears the riot grew out of white mens’objections to coloured men consorting with white women.

One-Worlder Lord Milner wrote a Memorandum of June 23rd “On the Repatriation of Coloured Men.”

”I have every reason to fear, that when we get these men back to their own colonies they might be tempted to revenge themselves on the white minorities there…”

Even when Windrush brought immigrants here in 1948 there were race battles: Liverpool again, between 31 July and 2 August, in Deptford on the 18th July; and Birmingham between the 6th and 8th of August 1949 involving immigrants from seafaring backgrounds but the idealists ignored them. The Times reported the Liverpool battle as about 50 persons ”mostly coloured appeared in court after. ..”a gang of negroes stoned several white men who were walking peacefully. They were armed with bottles, swords, daggers, iron bars, coshes and axes. The white men hopelessly outnumbered ran away. A Negro club appeared to have been the headquarters of the coloured men, and police officers were stoned and had bottles thrown at them from club windows as they tried to disperse the crowd.”(2)

Despite “the risks involved” they continued with the policy of free entry for immigrants. They kept no records of numbers entering, apparently because the immigrants were, as Commonwealth citizens, British subjects, nor did they give practical support, leaving it to local councils and voluntary organizations. Throughout the 50.s many delegations from local councils of areas effected went to 10, Downing Street, to ask for practical help and funds. On the 21st of November 1952 the Town Clerk of Brixton asked for regulation of immigration.

Churchill’s Cabinet first discussed immigration on 25th November 1952 when he asked in Cabinet if the Post Office employed large numbers of “coloured workers”. “If so, there was some risk social problems would be created.” They were from India, Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Mauritius, West Indies, Ceylon, British Guiana and Malaya.

The postmaster General was asked to report on it. He explained: “...the Post Offices main unions raised no objections to their employment at basic grades.” He added,” If it is felt that coloured workers should not be allowed to obtain employment in this country, I should have thought the proper course would be to deny them entry to the country.”

Churchill asked his staff to find out about problems in Lambeth, Brixton and Cardiff. B.G.Smallman, PS, to the Colonial Secretary, producing a paper on “The Coloured Population of the UK". This estimated the numbers to be 40-50,000 which included about 6,000 students. (3)

Accurate figures of immigrants were not kept because they were British subjects, though they kept records of emigrants to Canada, New Zealand and Australia. (3)

Historian Andrew Roberts reports that The Commonwealth Relations Office worried that with restrictions “ there might well be a chance of the governments of India and Pakistanistan introducing retaliatory restrictions against the entry or residence of members of the British business community.” Commonwealth Secretary Earl Home, worried that they should not give the impression that Commonwealth citizens from India, Pakistanistan and Ceylon would be less favourably treated than those from the Dominions otherwise there could be retaliation.

In private interviews Roberts shows the decadence of those around Churchill: “A Minister closely involved in the decision-making process, ‘ In fact…we were just stalling and hoping for the best’… One of Mr. Churchill’s private secretaries, ‘at that time it seemed a very good idea to get bus conductors and stuff’ … a junior minister, ‘it was becoming hard to find somebody to carry your bags at the station’.’’(4 )

On the 27th of June 1953 Sir Winston suffered a stroke that left him paralysed down the left side. After that, he told Butler, “I feel like an aeroplane at the end of its flight , in the dusk, with the petrol running out, in search of a safe landing.”(5) Interviewed by Andrew Roberts his Foreign Affairs Personal Secretary Anthony Montague- Brown recalled that he was “simply too tired to deal with the immigration problem. He could concentrate on a few big issues at a time- like the Russians -and the rest of the time he could only give a steer and not see it through.” (6) I

In November 1952 His Private Secretary, Sir John Colville noted, "He is getting tired and visibly ageing. He finds it hard to compose a speech and ideas no longer flow. (7)

Cabinet set up an Inter Departmental Committee to look into preventing an increase in the number. It reported its findings in December 1953. This Inter Departmental Committee comprised Ministry of Labour and National Service, the National Assistance Board, the Colonial Office and Chief Constables from areas where immigrants were settling.

The Home Secretary was to ask the Inter Departmental Committee, which was chaired by the Home Office, to look into preventing an increase in the number coming for employment. There is a note to R.J.Guppy of the Home Office in The Prime Ministers papers notifying him that Churchill had seen the report in that day's Daily Telegraph "about what is termed an influx of West Indians. He is considering bringing the matter before the Cabinet and would like to have a report from the Home Secretary about it." (8)

January 1954 Home Secretary Maxwell Fyfe reported on the findings of the “Working party on the Social and Economic Problems Arising from the Growing Influx into the United Kingdom of Coloured Workers”. He stated “the unskilled workers who form the majority are difficult to place because on the whole they are physically unsuited to heavy manual work…”(9)

For those familiar with the debate over the veracity of Enoch Powell’s claim in his famous Rivers Of Blood speech fourteen years later that an elderly white lady was being driven from her home, of the several news cuttings in the Prime Ministers papers is one from The News Chronicle of 7th December 1954 where a white woman asked for an injunction to stop her coloured landlord abusing or molesting her. Judge Wilfred Clothier in giving judgement in the case of a 62 year-old white woman living alone in a house full of coloured men, said that she was “hounded by these coloured men. This isanother case of black people entering half a house and never resting until they have turned the white people out. I hope there will be a remedy found quickly. One could be to turn back to Jamaica anyone found guilty of this practice. Another would be a prohibition by law to stop any black people buying a house containing white tenants.” Conrad Fairclough wanted Miss.Matilda McLaren out of where she had lived for 40 years yet he only came here in 1948.

They also have one from The Times also in 1954 gives further evidence that as far back as that we were being cleansed from our communities. There were 200 a month arriving without work or accommodation and was causing concern in London, Liverpool and Birmingham.

“On Merseyside, where 121 disembarked on Tuesday from the liner Ascania, there is a coloured population of about 10,000. It is estimated that 2,000 of them are receiving public assistance...”“all the Government departments concerned say they have no means of assessing how many of the immigrants from the West Indies and to a small extent from the African colonies, are drawing welfare allowances. This is because all the immigrants are recorded as British subjects, and have equal claims.”

“In Paddington hundreds of houses have been rented or bought by coloured people since the war. Statements are being taken from 2,000 residents who protested to the borough council against “the ever-increasing practice of selling to coloured people houses in which there are already white tenants.” Mr.George O’Connell, a member of the council said to me that a committee formed in the borough would sift through evidence provided by the residents. He hoped shortly to discuss the problem with Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, Home Secretary.”...We are not so much concerned about the effect on values of neighbouring properties as on the white tenants who are forced out by them.”

Churchill’s Private Secretary Montague-Brown to Civil Servant Johnston 2/11/1954 on an article in the Telegraph of 19 Oct in which the Jamaican Minister of Labour said he would not attempt to stop mass immigration. The P.M. thinks this should be brought up in Cabinet.

It is important to note that Commonwealth citizens had the right of entry to the UK and the same rights as British citizens when here. The difference is few came until after the Second war. The British Nationality Act of 1948 did not give them that right but codified it.

This point is made in the following example from the Cabinet Secretaries Notebooks released to the public in August 2007. These are the handwritten notes of Cabinet Meetings. They record that on 3 February 1954 under the item 'Coloured Workers', Sir Winston stated ‘Problems which will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK? Attracted by Welfare State. Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.'

Florence Horsbrugh, Minister of Education and MP for Manchester( Moss Side), added: 'Already becoming serious in Manchester.' David Maxwell Fyfe, the Home Secretary, gave a figure of 40,000 compared to 7,000 before the Second World War and raised the possibility of control. He said: 'There is a case on merits for exclude. riff-raff. But politically it wd. be represented & discussed on basis of colour limitation. That wd. offend the floating vote viz., the old Liberals. We shd. be reversing age-long tradition that. British Subjects have right of entry to mother-country of Empire. We should. offend Liberals, also sentimentalists.' He added: 'The colonial. populations are resented in Liverpool, Paddington & other areas by those who come into contact with them. But those who don't are apt to take a more Liberal view.'

Churchill intervened: 'The question is whether it is politically wise to allow public feeling to develop a little more before taking action.' Adding that it would be 'fatal' to let the situation develop too far Mr.Churchill concluded: 'Would like also to study possibility of "quota" - not to be exceeded.'

Another referred to an "increasing evil" and principles "laid down 200 years ago are not applicable today. See dangers of colour discrimination. But other [Dominions] control entry of B. subjects. Cd. we present action as coming into line...& securing uniformity?"

Mr.Churchill said the question was whether it might be wise "to allow public feeling to develop a little more - before taking action...May be wise to wait...But it would be fatal to let it develop too far." (11)

In March 1954 Maxwell Fyfe told Cabinet, “that large numbers of coloured people are living on National Assistance” and that “coloured landlords by their conduct are making life difficult for white people living in the same building or area…the result is that white people leave and the accommodation is then converted to furnished lettings for coloured people, with serious overcrowding and exploitation”.

In a Cabinet memorandum of 8 March Maxwell Fyfe feared “serious difficulties involved in contemplating action which would undoubtedly land the Government in some political controversy.”

In cabinet in October 1954 Mr. Churchill warned Maxwell Fyfe, “that the problems arising from the immigration of coloured people required urgent and serious consideration.” Maxwell-Fyfe emphasised that there is no power to prevent these people entering no matter how much the number may increase. (12)

The Cabinet Notebooks of this period show Churchill’s attempt to get a Bill to control immigration introduced. It also refers to Cyril Osborne’s 1954 attempt to introduce a Bill to control immigration. This is a transcript:

Lloyd George . Depn. y’day from B’ham. No objn. to them as workers. But qua housing. Figures are impressive.

Viscount Swinton. Might consider Cttee. on social aspects, alone.

A.E. Might be useful – to re-inforce action we decide to take.

P.M. Not in favour. Better to introduce Bill. May find we cd. get it thro’. At least we shd. have shown our view.

Marquess of Salisbury. Urgent.

H.H. Movement is starting now in favour of immign. from Barbados.

[Exit H.H.

This brings us to where we started with the discussion that Harold Macmillan referred to in his diary entry for January 20th 1955: "More discussion about the West Indian immigrants. A Bill is being drafted - but it's not an easy problem. P.M. thinks 'Keep England White' a good slogan!

The Bill Sir Winston referred to was not ready until June, two months after he had to retire because of his health. His successor Anthony Eden was an internationalist who told Conservative Cyril Osborne in the House of Commons, “There is no question of any action being taken to control immigration and in any case most were from Eire.” Then in November
Eden’s Cabinet ceased discussion of immigration. Just before he gave up the Premiership in 1955 Mr. Churchill told Spectator owner and editor Ian Gilmour that immigration "is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice". (13)

If Sir Winston had been well, we would not now be suffering the gun killings and knivings or Muslim bombings of our people.

(2499)

Cabinet Secretaries Notebooks covering this period CAB 195/13 was released at the beginning of February 2008. The papers of British Prime Ministers are classified under PREM. PREM 11/824 covers Churchill’s premiership. It has Information requested by the Prime Minister on immigration of coloured workers to the UK and their employment in the Civil Service; deportation of British subjects; powers of Colonial Governments; employment of Jamaicans in the UK 1952-1955

2 …” ( Panikos Paranyi (ed) “Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth Century.” (Leicester University.1996). The discussions on immigration are classified as our “racism” and usually by Marxist academics who blame us”whites” for any difficulties. See also
British Immigration Policy Since 1939: The Making of Multi-Racial Britain, By Ian R. G. Spencer. (Routledge. 1997)

3 Thee are held at the National Archive. CC100(52)8(cabinet Conclusions on 25/11/1952, CAB 128/25; The Post Master General’s report and the Chancellor being asked to restrict entry to the Civil Service is in CC106(52), 8/12/1952, CAB 128

And so we come to 1945 and the ever-radiant triumph of Absolute Good over Absolute Evil. So potent is the mystique of that year that the insipid welfare states of today's Europe clutch at it at every opportunity, in search of a few much-needed shreds of glory.

The dark side of that triumph, however, has been all but suppressed. It is the story of the crimes and atrocities of the victors and their protégés. Since Winston Churchill played a central role in the Allied victory, it is the story also of the crimes and atrocities in which Churchill was implicated. These include the forced repatriation of some two million Soviet subjects to the Soviet Union. Among these were tens of thousands who had fought with the Germans against Stalin, under the sponsorship of General Vlasov and his "Russian Army of Liberation." This is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, in[url]The Gulag Archipelago:

In their own country, Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious . . . what was the military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin's hands hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender.

Most shameful of all was the handing over of the Cossacks. They had never been Soviet citizens, since they had fought against the Red Army in the Civil War and then emigrated. Stalin, understandably, was particularly keen to get hold of them, and the British obliged. Solzhenitsyn wrote, of Winston Churchill:

He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and children. . . . This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths.

The "purge" of alleged collaborators in France was a blood-bath that claimed more victims than the Reign of Terror in the Great Revolution and not just among those who in one way or other had aided the Germans: included were any right-wingers the Communist resistance groups wished to liquidate.

The massacres carried out by Churchill's protégé, Tito, must be added to this list: tens of thousands of Croats, not simply the Ustasha, but any "class-enemies," in classical Communist style. There was also the murder of some 20,000 Slovene anti-Communist fighters by Tito and his killing squads. When Tito's Partisans rampaged in Trieste, which he was attempting to grab in 1945, additional thousands of Italian anti-Communists were massacred.

As the troops of Churchill's Soviet ally swept through central Europe and the Balkans, the mass deportations began. Some in the British government had qualms, feeling a certain responsibility. Churchill would have none of it. In January, 1945, for instance, he noted to the Foreign Office: "Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Rumania of Saxons [Germans] and others? . . . I cannot see the Russians are wrong in making 100 or 150 thousand of these people work their passage. . . . I cannot myself consider that it is wrong of the Russians to take Rumanians of any origin they like to work in the Russian coal-fields." About 500,000 German civilians were deported to work in Soviet Russia, in accordance with Churchill and Roosevelt's agreement at Yalta that such slave labor constituted a proper form of "reparations."

Worst of all was the expulsion of some 15 million Germans from their ancestral homelands in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, and the Sudetenland. This was done pursuant to the agreements at Tehran, where Churchill proposed that Poland be "moved west," and to Churchill's acquiescence in the Czech leader Eduard Benes's plan for the "ethnic cleansing" of Bohemia and Moravia. Around one-and-a-half to two million German civilians died in this process. As the Hungarian liberal Gaspar Tamas wrote, in driving out the Germans of east-central Europe, "whose ancestors built our cathedrals, monasteries, universities, and railroad stations," a whole ancient culture was effaced. But why should that mean anything to the Churchill devotees who call themselves "conservatives" in America today?

Then, to top it all, came the Nuremberg Trials, a travesty of justice condemned by the great Senator Robert Taft, where Stalin's judges and prosecutors, seasoned veterans of the purges of the 30s, participated in another great show-trial.

By 1946, Churchill was complaining in a voice of outrage of the happenings in eastern Europe: "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended over Europe." Goebbels had popularized the phrase "iron curtain," but it was accurate enough.

The European continent now contained a single, hegemonic power. "As the blinkers of war were removed," John Charmley writes, "Churchill began to perceive the magnitude of the mistake which had been made." In fact, Churchill's own expressions of profound self-doubt consort oddly with his admirers' retrospective triumphalism. After the war, he told Robert Boothby: "Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well." In the preface to the first volume of his history of World War II, Churchill explained why he was so troubled:

The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and that we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.

On V-E Day, he had announced the victory of "the cause of freedom in every land." But to his private secretary, he mused: "What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?" It was a bit late to raise the question. Really, what are we to make of a statesman who for years ignored the fact that the extinction of Germany as a power in Europe entailed . . . certain consequences? Is this another Bismarck or Metternich we are dealing with here? Or is it a case of a Woodrow Wilson redivivus of another Prince of Fools?

With the balance of power in Europe wrecked by his own policy, there was only one recourse open to Churchill: to bring America into Europe permanently. Thus, his anxious expostulations to the Americans, including his Fulton, Missouri "Iron Curtain" speech. Having destroyed Germany as the natural balance to Russia on the continent, he was now forced to try to embroil the United States in yet another war, this time a Cold War, that would last 45 years, and change America fundamentally, and perhaps irrevocably.

The Triumph of the Welfare State

In 1945, general elections were held in Britain, and the Labour Party won a landslide victory. Clement Attlee, and his colleagues took power and created the socialist welfare state. But the socializing of Britain was probably inevitable, given the war. It was a natural outgrowth of the wartime sense of solidarity and collectivist emotion, of the feeling that the experience of war had somehow rendered class structure and hierarchy, normal features of any advanced society, obsolete and indecent. And there was a second factor British society had already been to a large extent socialized in the war years, under Churchill himself. As Ludwig von Mises wrote:

Marching ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then Great Britain and many other European countries have adopted central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by Bruning . . . and in Great Britain not by the Labour Party but by the Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.

While Churchill waged war, he allowed Attlee to head various Cabinet committees on domestic policy and devise proposals on health, unemployment, education, etc. Churchill himself had already accepted the master-blueprint for the welfare state, the Beveridge Report. As he put it in a radio speech:

You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.

That Mises was correct in his judgment on Churchill's role is indicated by the conclusion of W. H. Greenleaf, in his monumental study of individualism and collectivism in modern Britain. Greenleaf states that it was Churchill who during the war years, instructed R. A. Butler to improve the education of the people and who accepted and sponsored the idea of a four-year plan for national development and the commitment to sustain full employment in the post-war period. As well he approved proposals to establish a national insurance scheme, services for housing and health, and was prepared to accept a broadening field of state enterprises. It was because of this coalition policy that Enoch Powell referred to the veritable social revolution which occurred in the years 1942—44. Aims of this kind were embodied in the Conservative declaration of policy issued by the Premier before the 1945 election.

When the Tories returned to power in 1951, "Churchill chose a Government which was the least recognizably Conservative in history." There was no attempt to roll back the welfare state, and the only industry that was really reprivatized was road haulage. Churchill "left the core of its [the Labour government's] work inviolate." The "Conservative" victory functioned like Republican victories in the United States, from Eisenhower on, to consolidate socialism. Churchill even undertook to make up for "deficiencies" in the welfare programs of the previous Labour government, in housing and public works. Most insidiously of all, he directed his leftist Labour Minister, Walter Monckton, to appease the unions at all costs. Churchill's surrender to the unions, "dictated by sheer political expediency," set the stage for the quagmire in labor relations that prevailed in Britain for the next two decades.

Yet, in truth, Churchill never cared a great deal about domestic affairs, even welfarism, except as a means of attaining and keeping office. What he loved was power, and the opportunities power provided to live a life of drama and struggle and endless war.

There is a way of looking at Winston Churchill that is very tempting: that he was a deeply flawed creature, who was summoned at a critical moment to do battle with a uniquely appalling evil, and whose very flaws contributed to a glorious victory in a way, like Merlin, in C.S. Lewis's great Christian novel, [url]That Hideous Strength. Such a judgment would, I believe, be superficial. A candid examination of his career, I suggest, yields a different conclusion: that, when all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.

Due to space limitations, the 169 detailed footnotes — which thoroughly document all assertions in Professor Raico's paper — are not included. They are, of course, included in the printed version of the paper, published in The Costs of War.

Ralph Raico [send him mail] is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape.

Mr. Churchill’s book, The Gathering Storm, is Volume I of a series of some five projected volumes. It deals chiefly with the period leading up to World War II. But as one reads, it soon becomes obvious that the book is preparing everyone for another storm that is gathering – World War III.

Churchill is writing with that in mind. He writes now with even more authority than in the old days. He is the only authentic “great man” of the world bourgeoisie. Far more than even Roosevelt, he was chief spokesman for Anglo-American imperialism in the war against Hitlerite Germany, so today he speaks for the same combination to a world audience on behalf of the war to the death against the Soviet Union and its satellites.

His writings and speeches, and particularly this book, are printed, abridged, serialized, quoted, ballyhooed in all sections of the world bourgeois press, as no other writing by any bourgeois statesman of our time. The Luce publications, in particular Life, dramatize its extracts from these memoirs with biographies of Churchill, illustrations and layouts, on which obviously no time and money have been spared. Life claims that it goes into 36 percent of the homes of the United States, and is read by over 20 million people. This whole setup is war propaganda on a colossal scale, such as our fathers and forefathers, or for that matter we ourselves ten years ago did not know. Washington needs these particular services badly. Truman, Forrestal, and the rest are simply incapable of doing anything else except bleating platitudes about “peace,” “defense of our American way of life,” etc. In fact, it seems highly probable that Churchill’s resounding periods gain a proportionately greater audience, more deference (and more cash) in the United States than anywhere else in the world, even Britain.

To the readers of Fourth International, Churchill’s book, though full of information about diplomatic intrigue and the mechanics of war-making, can throw no particular light on the causes of World War II, or the preparations for World War III. But it affords a certain insight into bourgeois society and politics, and the man who speaks for it. It is with these interrelated aspects that this writer is here concerned.“The Unnecessary War”

Churchill’s central theme is so simple that a child could not miss it.

“There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.”

But having established that, he then faces the inevitable query: why then did it lake place? And on this all-important question Churchill lets out all the stops.

Here are some of his remarks on the men and the politics of 1918-39.

“History will characterise all these transactions as insane.”
“All this is a sad story of complicated idiocy...”
“But this modest requirement [concerted action by the victorious powers after 1918] the might, civilization, learning, knowledge, science of the victors were unable to supply.”
“It is difficult to find a parallel to the unwisdom of the British and weakness of the French Governments...”
“The economic clauses of the treaty [of Versailles] were malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile.”
“...all these constituted a picture of British fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt...”
“We must regard as deeply blameworthy before history the conduct not only of the British National and mainly Conservative government, but of the Labour-Socialist and Liberal Parties ...”
“... an administration more disastrous than any in our history ...”

It is natural that these blistering appreciations are made chiefly about the British and the European politicians. He is more careful in his remarks about the American politicians, but his opinion of them is in no way different. After saying that it is difficult to find a parallel to the unwisdom and weakness of the British and French Governments, he adds immediately: “nor can the United States escape the censure of history.”

“The censure of history” is his diplomatic phrasing for the censure of Winston Churchill which he distributes so liberally.

These then were the men who ruled England, France, and the United States between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. [It is clear that he is leaving for later volumes any full development of his views on the USSR. It should be noted, however, that consistent as has been his hatred for the USSR, his special fury is reserved for the Trotskyists because of their unshaken adherence to the doctrines of Lenin and Trotsky.] To this we have to add only his characterization of the dictator of Germany as: “a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast – Corporal Hitler.”

All the millions who have read and will read Churchill should pause a long while and ponder over what this means. On the one side, the side of the democracies, he shows us insanity, complicated idiocy, unparalleled unwisdom and weakness, government more disastrous than ever before, fatuity and fecklessness; on the other side, a ferocious maniac. That was their society, bourgeois society. Fools, idiots, madmen, cowards ruled Western Europe and America. But for them the catastrophe of the war would not have fallen upon us. We limit ourselves to two questions of the many that are begging to be asked:

1) How could this happen, what sort of system is this that produces democratic idiots or fascist maniacs as rulers?

2) How do we know that the same thing is not going on today? Many of the men who ruled then are in high position now. Shall we have World War III and then learn that the men who led us into it were fools, idiots, and maniacs?

To thinking people Churchill’s book must bring at the very start a profound disquiet about these far-reaching denunciations and what they imply for us today. It is obvious that the question cannot be as simple as Churchill makes it out to be.

Marxism, revolutionary socialism, has no quarrel with these concrete judgments of the great spokesmen of the bourgeoisie. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. This is an expression frequent among Marxists. It is precisely our clear consciousness of the folly and madness of bourgeois society which forms the basis of our unalterable opposition to it in war as well as in peace. And folly, madness, idiocy will rule bourgeois society until it is torn up by the roots and replaced by socialism. Such of course, is not the view of Churchill. To this collection of fatuous and feckless idiots, Churchill does not counterpose a new social order. He counterposes – himself. It sounds incredible but it is true. On the one hand were the insane, the idiots and the maniacs, and on the other – Winston Churchill. This is the legend under which the people are being shepherded to listen to him – and be guided into the next war. Extracts from Churchill’s second volume are now being advertised with a statesman-like portrait of Churchill, in spectacles and civilian clothes, carefully unmilitary. The caption reads, “I hope you will give full consideration to my words. I have not always been wrong.”

This is the second step in the propaganda barrage. Churchill was not only the man who with Roosevelt led the world to victory. He, we are given to understand, foresaw all that was going to happen. He fought for his position in vain. If only the insane and the complicated idiots had listened to him, things would have been different. When they had ruined the situation they had to turn to him to win victory for them. If we are wise we should listen to him today. That is the legend. It disposes of the doubts about the last war, and puts him into an unassailable position to plug for the next one. The only thing wrong with this story is that it isn’t true. It is a fiction skillfully constructed out of some thin elements of fact and much paste, tinsel and wordage. The first thing to do is to find out exactly who and what is this Winston Churchill.A Few Facts About Churchill

The American people should know that long before 1939, when the outbreak of war saved his career, Winston Churchill had established himself as the most discredited, the most untrustworthy, and the most irresponsible of all the senior politicians in England. The rulers of Britain did not take him seriously on the politics of war because, except for his capabilities as a war minister, they did not take him seriously on anything except his capacity to make a serious nuisance of himself.

Churchill was born the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant young nobleman who reached the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer and seemed headed for the premiership but wrecked his career by his erratic political behavior. His character was adequately summed up in the phrase “the boy who would not grow up.” It was the kind of heritage that a careful politician would take care to live down. It is characteristic of Winston Churchill that he lived up to it. He joined the army as a cavalry officer and thus began his lifelong and passionate interest in war. He became a war correspondent, was captured by the Boers and escaped. When he lectured in New York in 1906, at the age of twenty-six, he was billed as “the hero of five wars.” He was already actively interested in politics. In the early years of the century, liberalism seemed in the ascendancy in Britain. Churchill made a spectacular break with the Tory Party and joined the Liberals.

He became Home Secretary and distinguished himself by what is derisively known as the Battle of Sidney Street. A group of foreign anarchists well supplied with arms refused to give themselves up to the police. Churchill converted a police operation into a battle. He went down himself to take charge of the “struggle” (or as privileged observer), was nearly killed and created a scandal among his colleagues and the sober-minded British people. In 1911 he went over to the Admiralty and there did his best work, preparing the fleet for 1914.

But the war of 1914 had no sooner begun than Churchill was at it again. A critical situation at Antwerp found Churchill, still head of the Admiralty, persuading the reluctant Sir Edward Grey to let him go to Belgium in person. He found himself as usual under fire. The battle stimulated him to offer, from Antwerp, his resignation from the Admiralty to take command of the British land forces at Antwerp. The transfer was not made but as one of his biographers (Philip Guedalla) says of the unsatisfactory outcome: “There was a vague feeling that Mr. Churchill’s restlessness might be to blame ... that it was Sidney Street over again ...”

By 1915, despite his competence, he had lost his post at the Admiralty. He held other posts, but it is related of him that at one time while a minister in London he did most of the work in a chateau in France so as to be near the firing line. After World War I he was the moving spirit in the military intervention against Russia. It is known that in 1944 to keep Churchill from joining the cross-channel expedition the present king had to threaten that he would also join it if Churchill insisted on going; baffled here, nevertheless Churchill turned up with the invading army in the last stages of the victory against Germany.

That is the man. Every British politician knew him and his Napoleonic complex, his preoccupation with war and war preparations, his extraordinary capacity for making a fool of himself on critical occasions. Asquith, Prime Minister in 1914, wrote of him “Winston, who has got on all his war-paint, is longing for a sea-fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben.” Someone who saw him at the beginning of the 1914 war remarked on his “happy face.”
In this book the same thing appears.

When war was finally declared in 1939 and he was sure of being included in the war ministry, he describes his feelings.

“There [in the House of Commons] I received a note from the Prime Minister asking me to come to his room as soon as the debate died down. As I sat in my place, listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me, after the intense passions and excitements of the last few days. I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of uplifted detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of old England, peace-loving; and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres so far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation. I tried to convey some of this mood to the House when I spoke, not without acceptance.”

That is his sphere. When the war has begun and men want to hear words of resolution and single-minded devotion to the conflict, to hear the greedy, bloody, bestial business glamorized and made to look like something noble and uplifting, then the stage is set for Churchill.

What effect could the warnings about war and preparedness of this notorious gladiator have on the men who ruled Britain and France in this period? Perhaps the best thing that could have happened to the cause he claims to have advocated is that he should have had nothing to say about it. In such a case, words like right and wrong have no meaning. He could neither be right nor wrong for he was singing the same tune all his life. He is doing it today. While the regular diplomats of Western Europe and America are busy jockeying for position with Stalin and seeking, as is the cartful way of these confidence-men, to place the blame on the enemy, Churchill a few months ago shouted: Let us give Stalin an ultimatum and a period in which to answer, and if he does not, let us have the show-down. That is his perpetual role. The man of the show-down, always ready for ,it, always preparing for it, especially when in opposition and in conflict with the leaders of his party.

In the cabinet reshuffle of 1936, everyone expected him to be included because of his audacity as a war minister. Baldwin left him out. Churchill writes: He thought no doubt, that he had given me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.” He says too, “There was much mockery in the press about my exclusion.” Exactly. His career was always in danger. His adventures were the subject of perpetual mockery.

We can now judge with a little more sense of proportion Churchill’s claim that on a question vital to the world he was the purveyor of wisdom to fatuous idiots and fouls. If the words idiot and fatuity, etc., were to be applied up to 1936, chief candidate would have been Churchill himself. Never at any time did he behave like a man who had a serious point of view, knew what was at stake and fought seriously for it.

These erratic habits of his were intimately connected with the failure of his supposedly correct policy on the var. It was precisely during the time that he was supposed to be fighting this life-and-death struggle to prevent the unnecessary war, that Churchill showed that age had not withered nor custom staled the infinite variety of what the novelist, Arnold Bonnet, called his “incurable foolishness.” He describes two of his political adventures in this book and it is clear that to this day he is not fully aware of the folly of his procedure in relation to his war policy.

The first concerns India. In 1931, British imperialism began the colossal, and as it has proved, the impossible task of reconciling India to British rule by binding the Indian bourgeoisie and the feudal lords to the British system. After Hitler’s accession to power in Germany this was an urgent task precisely because of the uncertain world situation. Churchill, however, for years rallied the worst of the Daily Mail type of Conservatives and led a struggle against Baldwin which for intemperance and unscrupulousness even he has rarely surpassed. He was ignominiously defeated as he was bound to be. Today he can still write that his determined opposition to any kind of self-government for India was correct and for proof cites the massacres of Moslems and Hindus. He is still of the opinion that the Members “of all parties” were “ignorant.” Yet, any level-headed capitalist politician could not but see that some sort of settlement and pacification of India was necessary for any British government that contemplated war.

By the end of his battle of India, the Conservative Party had no use whatever for him. However by 1936 he had built around himself a little group around a policy he called “Arms and the Covenant,” the Covenant being the League of Nations. The sharpening international situation was giving weight to their attacks upon the policy of the Baldwin government. But then came the crisis of Edward VIII and Wallie Simpson. Here was another battle and Churchill plunged into it. Let him describe himself the effect of one speech to a hostile House of Commons.

“There were several moments when I seemed to be entirely alone against a wrathful House of Commons, I am not, when in action, unduly affected by hostile currents of feelings; but it was on more than one occasion almost physically impossible to make myself heard.”

What was the result? These are his own words.

“All the forces I had gathered together on ‘Arms and the Covenant,’ of which I conceived myself to be the mainspring, were estranged or dissolved, and I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.”

Not entirely though. Nothing is more illuminating of what Britain’s rulers thought of Churchill than his account of how, all through his years of political exile, every British Prime Minister saw to it that he was well informed of the latest military and scientific developments; he was even placed on some of the most secret war committees. This explains his place in British politics. He was a kind of national strong-arm man who was kept well trained and in shape, for the day when blows were needed. Until then nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. And this book shows that no one had worked more assiduously to build this reputation than himself.

But perhaps, it may be said, that despite all his follies Churchill was right in his consistent opposition on the war issue. His book explodes that fable. Churchill’s opposition on the actual issue of the war was no different from his shrill opposition on other issues. He spoke with more authority perhaps on this, and he certainly impressed outsiders and the general public. But he did not impress the politicians and for one very good reason. They knew that they could have shut up his mouth at any time by giving him office. The measure of their contempt for him can be judged by the fact that eloquent and active as he was they refused to do this.

History is full of men who felt that a certain policy was essential to the life of their country or their class and fought for it to the end, reckless of victory, defeat or their personal fate. Such for instance was the uncompromising struggle of Clemenceau for leadership of France in the days of 1914-18 when the government was in such a crisis that at one lime his attacks upon the government sounded like treason to the bourgeoisie. No such mantle can be hung on Winston Churchill despite all the assiduous tailoring of Henry Luce. Churchill knows better than to make any great claims for himself on this matter. There are too many men alive who could tear him to bits if he tried to do this. It was not principled opposition Which kept him out of the ministry in 1936 and thus saved him from getting himself as thoroughly compromised as Baldwin and Chamberlain. It was his bad reputation and habits. He writes:

“Mr. Baldwin knew no more than I, how great was the service he was doing me in preventing me from becoming involved in all the Cabinet compromises and shortcomings of the next three years, and from having, if I remained a Minister, to enter upon a war bearing direct responsibility for conditions of national defence bound to prove fearfully inadequate.

“This was not the first time – or, indeed the last – that I have received a blessing in what was at the time a very effective disguise.”

What kind of hero is this? That Churchill did not have his own warm well-padded cell in the lunatic asylum of the insane and complicatedly idiotic was due to no fault of his own. He tried hard enough to get in. It was the lunatics inside who kept him out; they did not want a lunatic of that stamp in with them. Until the war came Churchill was nobody, played no heroic role, opposed the government but was always ready to enter it. How hollow becomes the great boast with its sham modesty “I was not always wrong.”An Alternative Road to Ruin

But maybe Churchill did have the correct policy, if even he did not make any heroic battle for it. Now this is precisely what was in dispute all the time and is still in dispute. And here, above all, Churchill’s policy, in so far as he had a policy, seemed to his colleagues the quintessence and crown of his irresponsibility.

Let us try to get clear exactly what Churchill’s policy was not.

First of all Churchill was not and today is no enemy of either dictatorship or fascism. He is an enemy of all who threaten the British Empire and the “pleasant life” he leads and refers to so often. That is all. On January 30, 1939, this stern opponent of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators wrote as follows:

“Up till a few years ago many people in Britain admired the work which the extraordinary man Signor Mussolini had done for his country. He had brought it out of incipient anarchy into a position of dignity and order which was admired even by those who regretted the suspension of Italian freedom.” (Step by Step, 1936-1939, by Winston Churchill, p. 285.)

On February 23, 1939 he wrote of Franco:
“He now has the opportunity of becoming a great Spaniard of whom it may be written a hundred years hence: ‘He united his country and rebuilt its greatness. Apart from that he reconciled the past with the present, and broadened the life of the working people while preserving the faith and structure of the Spanish nation.’ Such an achievement would rank in history with the work of Ferdinand and Isabella and the glories of Charles V.” (Ibid, p.285.)

Nor was Churchill, or any British minister for that matter, ready to give Hitler a “free hand” in the East against Russia. Conquest of Eastern Europe by Hiller meant inevitably that France and Britain would next be on the list of an enormously strengthened Germany. To Ribbentrop’s request for a free hand in the Fast, Churchill replied:

“... I said at once that I was sure the British government would not agree to give Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe. It was true that we were on bad terms with Soviet Russia and that we hated Communism as much as Hitler did, but he might be sure that, even if France were safeguarded, Great Britain would never disinterest herself in the fortunes of the Continent to any extent that would enable Germany to gain the domination of Central and Eastern Europe.”

What then was the policy? As far as the record goes in this book he makes an extraordinarily good case for himself on the question of the air-race with Germany. But that is not enough to build the pedestal for his statue. And beyond this it is difficult to find out exactly what at any precise moment, he concretely stood for.

He claims today that the Allied nations never should have disarmed. What is the meaning of this observation? In the economic crisis that followed 1929 any government that tried to maintain the burden of armaments would have been thrown out of office. The British masses, proletarian and petty-bourgeois, would not have stood for it. And least of all from the pro-Mussolini, pro-Franco, erratic Churchill. The same thing held for France. These idiotic statesmen were fighting for their political lives and their political systems. They had an enemy abroad but they had an enemy at home. They could only do the best they could, and despite all of Churchill’s talk, he could not have done better.

His second major point is even more untenable than his first. He thinks that when Hitler began to rearm he should and could have been defeated, in 1934, in 1936, and again in 1938. This is why the war was the most unnecessary in history. First of all it is extremely doubtful if Churchill ever directly gave any such advice at these particular times. He does not say this anywhere. He says he thought so, or he thinks so, which are both very different things from the first. But if we understand what was the logic of the insane and the idiotic, for they had a logic, we shall see why they distrusted Churchill so profoundly. His whole temper and attitude as expressed in the Battle of Sidney Street, the Antwerp adventure and the agitation on India were not only discreditable and compromising to himself and to his party. This supposed readiness to engage the enemy in the circumstances of 1934-39 could have precipitated the destruction of the Empire. He himself writes in this hook:

“We have at length emerged from a scene of material ruin and moral havoc the like of which had never darkened the imagination of former centuries. After all that we suffered and achieved, we find ourselves still confronted with problems and perils not less but far more formidable than those through which we have so narrowly made our way.”

Quite so. And it is this consciousness of doom which the erratic Churchill never understood and to this day does not understand despite his sounding phrases. Neville Chamberlain (and this found expression in the responsible American press) believed that another war would mean the end of the British empire, whether Britain won or lost. George V, it was reported, believed that he would be the last king of Great Britain. Every European government knew in its heart that Hitler meant to fight, but every government trembled to overthrow him because 1) they did not know what would succeed him in Europe; 2) they did not know what would be the effect on their own countries of defeating Germany and unloosing an avalanche in Europe. These considerations never troubled the belligerent Churchill. He was always ready to jump on his horse and lead the charge “God for England, Winston and St. George.”

Never since the Commune had the class struggle been so bitter in France as between 1934 and 1938. In Britain in 1933, the workers passed a resolution by a tremendous majority which vowed never to support the British Government in any imperialist war. The British statesmen remembered that in 1919-21 in Ireland, in Egypt, in India, and in a dozen other places, the Empire had rocked on its foundations. Churchill’s attitude on India showed that all this was nothing to him. Lloyd George in 1934 warned openly that Hitler should not be overthrown. Communism, said Lloyd George, will take his place and, he added, a German communism far more efficient than communism of the Russian type. This was the dilemma. The idiots and the insane fought for peace because at all costs they wanted, to prevent the consequences of war. They hesitated to form the alliance with Stalin. Look at Europe today and the Kremlin’s position in it. These men were conscious of the real dangers. Look at Britain today, living only by self-interested charity from the United States.

Churchill says that the French statesmen should have engaged Hitler when he marched into the Rhineland in March 1936. Sure, Hitler would have been defeated. And then, what? A few months afterward, in June to be exact, there were the strikes in France when the workers seized the factories. In July came the Spanish Revolution. Imagine what would have happened to that Europe if Hitler had been overthrown in the spring of 1936 by what would have been a very brief war. The politicians were insane not to overthrow him. But they would have been insane to overthrow him. They were fatuous to try to get him to fight the Soviet Union alone. But the complicated situation forced upon them the complicated idiocy of trying to get him to fight the Soviet Union and yet not give him a free hand in the East. Churchill thinks that Czechoslovakia should have fought in 1938. France, he says, would have been bound to come in and England would have been compelled to follow.

As characteristic of him he never learns, not even from history. There were powerful elements in the ruling classes of Czechoslovakia and of Poland who felt that once Russian troops entered these territories they would never get them out again. Who in 1948 can say from their point of view that they were wrong? Today the war has been fought. Victory has been won. And there remains a Europe dominated by an enemy of imperialist Britain far more securely installed than was Germany. Churchill is as busy as ever preparing for this new war. The idiots and the fatuous could tell him with justice: “We never heard from you one single word which showed that you understood the perils in which our civilization stood. You were then as we have always known you, seeing red on every occasion, and perpetually irresponsible.” They would be right.

Lenin summed up our age many years ago: imperialist war and proletarian revolution. Socialism or barbarism. Churchill saw only one – the war. For the insane, the idiotic, the fatuous, in short for the agents of capitalism, socialism or barbarism was a terrible choice. They tried to avoid both. Churchill rides gallantly, intent on what he calls victory. But another such victory and what would remain? Today as ten years ago that does not trouble him overmuch. His motto remains unchanged; “On to the battle. Conquer first and see what happens afterward.” His vaunted policy was an alternative road to ruin. That was all. Neither then nor now have the great masses of people anything to learn from him. His quarrels with his opponent are merely disputes over ways of trying to save what is doomed to destruction – bourgeois society.As Reactionary as Ever

From all this if must not be considered that Churchill is a negligible person. That would be stupidity. Put him in a war department, or give him a war to lead, and from all the evidence he is far above his colleagues, in energy, in knowledge, in attention to business and curiously enough, in tempering his audacity with sobriety of judgment. He has also developed another valuable gift. His famous sense of history is famous nonsense. He has none, as I shall show in a moment. What he does have in his head is the writings of the great British historians and the speeches of the great British orators. This and his singlemindedness, his operatic consciousness of playing a great role in historic conflicts, enable him at times to rise to great heights of rhetoric.

At times his words can be singularly effective, especially when people are frightened and bewildered by the complex class, national and international currents of modern war. Churchill has no doubts, as a bull in a China shop has no doubts. He has a great gift of phrase, and long training as a journalist gives him an eye for the salient facts in a military or political situation. At all points he is equipped for war, to shout for war, to glamorize past wars, to explain a war that is going on, to make new ones look like a defense of civilization.

Politically he is as stupid a reactionary as ever. The war was no sooner over than he aroused universal execration in Britain by saying on the radio that the victory of the Labour Party would mean a Gestapo for Britain. He him-self lost thousands of votes in his own constituency. Today in his own party the wish is widespread that he would resign. It is a measure of the degeneration of our society that such a man should be its most notable spokesman; above all it is a scandal that he should be represented in the United States as a defender of democracy and civilization. In reality the evidence is thick in this book that Churchill is not merely a conservative, but is today as ever a vicious reactionary. A few examples will suffice.

Today, even after the terrible experiences of the war, he has no hostility to the German Junkers with their feudal estates and their perpetual war-making, he remains opposed to the Weimar Republic. He wanted a monarchy. On page 11 of his book he says: “All the strong elements, military and feudal, which might have rallied to a constitutional monarchy and for its sake respected and sustained the new democratic and parliamentary processes, were for the time being unhinged.”

Here speaks the provincial British reactionary. Despite all his historical quotations and references he cannot to this day see that monarchy is doomed. It is difficult to decide which is greater, the folly that a monarchy would have solved, the contradictions of capitalist Germany; or the reactionary mentality which always finds its friends and subjects of admiration or excuse in people like Mussolini, Franco, the German Junkers, the military and feudal elements.

He dares even to admire Hitler. In this book, after all that has happened, writing about Hitler in 1932 he uses these sentences: “I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side. He had a perfect right, to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England, Germany, and France to be friends.” Hitler attacked Britain. That is all that concerned Churchill. But for that he would have admired him to this day.

Nor is that the least of his consistent violations of elementary decency. Readers of this book will be struck by Churchill’s constant use of the term race where other writers would use people or nation. “Polish race,” “German racial bloc,” etc. You have to read the book itself and not the extracts to know why. In the extracts which appeared in Life, April 19, 1948, speaking to an emissary of Hitler, Churchill is made to say :

“Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? How can any man help how he is born?”

It sounds bad enough. Turn to page 83 of this book and see what he really wrote.

“Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with the Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in arty walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?”

Admiration for dictatorship and military and feudal elements, racial arrogance, anti-Semitism, these and much more stare you in the face as soon as you shake yourself free of bourgeois propaganda and his rolling periods. It is characteristic of his impudence that he scorns to hide them. It is one of the urgent tasks of the struggle against war to expose before the American people the pretensions of this reactionary prize-fighter to be a defender of democracy and civilization.